Structural vulnerability to narcotics-driven firearm violence: An ethnographic and epidemiological study of Philadelphia's Puerto Rican inner-city

Abstract

Background: The United States is experiencing a continuing crisis of gun violence, and economically marginalized and racially segregated inner-city areas are among the most affected. To decrease this violence, public health interventions must engage with the complex social factors and structural drivers-especially with regard to the clandestine sale of narcotics-that have turned the neighborhood streets of specific vulnerable subgroups into concrete killing fields. Here we present a mixed-methods ethnographic and epidemiological assessment of narcotics-driven firearm violence in Philadelphia's impoverished, majority Puerto Rican neighborhoods.

Methods: Using an exploratory sequential study design, we formulated hypotheses about ethnic/racial vulnerability to violence, based on half a dozen years of intensive participant-observation ethnographic fieldwork. We subsequently tested them statistically, by combining geo-referenced incidents of narcotics- and firearm-related crime from the Philadelphia police department with census information representing race and poverty levels. We explored the racialized relationships between poverty, narcotics, and violence, melding ethnography, graphing, and Poisson regression.

Findings: Even controlling for poverty levels, impoverished majority-Puerto Rican areas in Philadelphia are exposed to significantly higher levels of gun violence than majority-white or black neighborhoods. Our mixed methods data suggest that this reflects the unique social position of these neighborhoods as a racial meeting ground in deeply segregated Philadelphia, which has converted them into a retail endpoint for the sale of astronomical levels of narcotics.

Implications: We document racial/ethnic and economic disparities in exposure to firearm violence and contextualize them ethnographically in the lived experience of community members. The exceptionally concentrated and high-volume retail narcotics trade, and the violence it generates in Philadelphia's poor Puerto Rican neighborhoods, reflect unique structural vulnerability and cultural factors. For most young people in these areas, the narcotics economy is the most readily accessible form of employment and social mobility. The performance of violence is an implicit part of survival in these lucrative, illegal narcotics markets, as well as in the overcrowded jails and prisons through which entry-level sellers cycle chronically. To address the structural drivers of violence, an inner-city Marshall Plan is needed that should include well-funded formal employment programs, gun control, re-training police officers to curb the routinization of brutality, reform of criminal justice to prioritize rehabilitation over punishment, and decriminalization of narcotics possession and low-level sales.

Fig 1. Homicides in ethnographic field site from 2006–2017 (203 total).

A) Location of ethnographic field site in North Philadelphia. B) Location of each homicide incident occurring in the ethnographic site during this time. C) Monthly trends in the number of homicides occurring in the field site.

Fig 2. Census tract level counts of crime-related incidents.

Based on data from the Philadelphia police department, as well as the percent of individuals living under the poverty line and the majority social group from 2012 to 2016 American Community Survey data.

Fig 3. A narcotics transaction in the ethnographic field site in Puerto Rican inner-city Philadelphia.

Hit hard by deindustrialization and disinvestment from the inner-city, young men born in this neighborhood often find themselves working in the lowest-level of the retail narcotics economy, selling heroin and cocaine in the shadow of the factories that used to employ their new immigrant grandparents. Photo by George Karandinos.

Fig 4. Crime-related incidents in the ethnographic field site from 2006–2017 by type of incident.

Shown by monthly incidence (left) and spatial distribution (right).

Fig 5. Poverty-crime gradients by racial group.

Bars represent the average number of crime-related incidents per census tract, from 2006 to 2017, by percent of the population living in poverty, separate for majority-Puerto Rican, -black, and-white areas. The fitted lines represent model predictions from the Poisson regression, with 95% confidence intervals.

Fig 6. Racial disparity among maximally impoverished neighborhoods.

The ratio, with 95% confidence interval, between social groups of predicted levels of violence- or narcotics-related crime from 2006 to 2017, for a poverty level of 60%, similar to our field site in the most impoverished corner of inner-city, Puerto Rican Philadelphia. For example, a ratio of 6.1 between whites and Puerto Ricans for narcotics related crime indicates that majority Puerto Rican areas were predicted to have over 6 times more narcotics crime relative to majority white areas, at a poverty level of 60%.