East Side Story: Disaggregating Gang Homicides in East Los Angeles

Abstract

This research extends the homicide literature by using latent class analysis methods to examine the neighborhood structural and demographic characteristics of different categories of homicides in the Hollenbeck Community Policing Area of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). The Hollenbeck area itself is a 15 square-mile region with approximately 187,000 residents, the majority of whom are Latino (84 percent). Hollenbeck also has a protracted history of intergenerational Latinx gangs with local neighborhood residents viewing them as a fundamental social problem. Hollenbeck has over 30 active street gangs, each claiming a geographically defined territory, many of which have remained stable during the study period. Over twenty years (1990–2012) of homicide data collected from Hollenbeck’s Homicide Division are utilized to create an empirically rigorous typology of homicide incidents and to test whether or not gang homicides are sufficiently distinct in nature to be a unique category in the latent class analysis.