Downloaded By: [Temple University] At: 22:51 16 December 2007 JUSTICE QUARTERLY VOLUME 24 NUMBER 4 (DECEMBER 2007) ISSN 0741-8825 print/1745-9109 online/07/040679-26 © 2007 Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences DOI: 10.1080/07418820701717169 Impacts of Violent Crime and Neighborhood Structure on Trusting Your Neighbors R. Marie Garcia, Ralph B. Taylor and Brian A. Lawton Taylor and Francis Ltd RJQY_A_271621.sgm 10.1080/07418820701717169 Justice Quarterly 0741-8825 (print)/1745-9109 (online) Original Article 2007 Taylor & Francis 24 4 000000December 2007 R MarieGarcia rmgarcia@temple.edu The current work investigated impacts of local violent crime rates on residents’ willingness to trust neighbors. Crime has been thought to “atomize” commu- nity. Many works have considered impacts of crime on local social climate or vice versa. A smaller number of works have linked crime with general judgments about trustworthiness, but there has been little work on crime and trust of neighbors. 2002 survey data of 4,133 Philadelphia residents in 45 neighborhoods were combined with census and reported crime data to address this question. Multilevel, multinomial logit models confirmed that residents’ willingness to trust their neighbors varied significantly across neighborhoods for two response category contrasts: strongly agreeing or agreeing neighbors were trustworthy, each relative to strongly disagreeing. As expected, residents in neighborhoods with higher crime rates judged their neighbors as less dependable, even after controlling for local participation. Neighborhood crime and status impacts both depended on the contrast considered and on how status and crime were disentangled. Results align with some earlier works showing contingent effects of crime on ties, or contingent effects of ties on crime. Results extend earlier works by simultaneously focusing on one critical and central assessment of neighbors, showing important differences across response categories, and simultaneously finding extraneighborhood impacts. Keywords trust; spatial lag; neighbors; neighborhood structure; violent crime; communities and crime R. Marie Garcia is a fifth-year doctoral student in the department of Criminal Justice at Temple University. Her dissertation research examines perceptions of danger among Federal correctional officers. Ralph Taylor’s recent and forthcoming publications have been in the areas of community change and motor vehicle theft (Walsh and Taylor), determinants of household gun collection sizes (Wyant and Taylor), the middle stages of jury selection, and untested and perhaps unrealistic assumptions behind some DNA policies. Brian A. Lawton is currently an Assistant Professor in the College of Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University. His research interests include police discretion and accountability, police use of force, research methodology, and quantitative analyses. Correspondence to: R. Marie Garcia, Department of Criminal Justice, Temple University, 1115 West Berks Street, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA. E-mail: rmgarcia@temple.edu