A Neutral Model of Gang Territory Formation

Friday, September 23, 2011 - 11:00am - 11:45am

Many criminal street gangs are territorial in nature claiming compact geographic regions as their home turf. Gangs defend their territories both with the threat and use of violence. A neutral model based on spatial Lotka-Volterra competition equations shows that territories are strictly stable only where gangs are exactly symmetrical in all characteristics, which we interpret as a neutral condition. We test the model against data on violent crime involving thirteen street gangs in a region of Los Angeles. We find excellent agreement between model predictions and the observed spatial distribution of crime.

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