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Eight years of homicide evolution in Monterrey, Mexico: a network approach

Homicide is without doubt one of Mexico’s most important security problems, with data showing that this dismal kind of violence sky-rocketed shortly after the war on drugs was declared in 2007. Since then, violent war-like zones have appeared and disappeared throughout Mexico, causing unfathomable h...

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Autores principales: Dorantes-Gilardi, Rodrigo, García-Cortés, Diana, Hernández-Ramos, Hiram, Espinal-Enríquez, Jesús
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7726575/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33299031
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-78352-9
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author Dorantes-Gilardi, Rodrigo
García-Cortés, Diana
Hernández-Ramos, Hiram
Espinal-Enríquez, Jesús
author_facet Dorantes-Gilardi, Rodrigo
García-Cortés, Diana
Hernández-Ramos, Hiram
Espinal-Enríquez, Jesús
author_sort Dorantes-Gilardi, Rodrigo
collection PubMed
description Homicide is without doubt one of Mexico’s most important security problems, with data showing that this dismal kind of violence sky-rocketed shortly after the war on drugs was declared in 2007. Since then, violent war-like zones have appeared and disappeared throughout Mexico, causing unfathomable human, social and economic losses. One of the most emblematic of these zones is the Monterrey metropolitan area (MMA), a central scenario in the narco-war. Being an important metropolitan area in Mexico and a business hub, MMA has counted hundreds to thousands of casualties. In spite of several approaches being developed to understand and analyze crime in general, and homicide in particular, the lack of accurate spatio-temporal homicide data results in incomplete descriptions. In order to describe the manner in which violence has evolved and spread in time and space through the city, here we propose a network-based approach. For this purpose, we define a homicide network where nodes are geographical entities that are connected through spatial and temporal relationships. We analyzed the time series of homicides in different municipalities and neighborhoods of the MMA, to observe whether or not a global correlation appeared. We studied the spatial correlation between neighborhoods where homicides took place, to observe whether distance is a factor of influence in the frequency of homicides. We constructed yearly co-occurrence networks, by correlating neighborhoods with homicides happening within a same week, and counting the co-occurrences of these neighborhood pairs in 1 year. We also constructed a crime network by aggregating all data of homicides, eliminating the temporal correlation, in order to observe whether homicide clusters appeared, and what those clusters were distributed geographically. Finally, we correlated the location and frequency of homicides with roads, freeways and highways, to observe if a trend in the homicidal violence appeared. Our network approach in the homicide evolution of MMA allows us to identify that (1) analyzing the whole 86-month period, we observed a correlation between close cities, which decreases in distant places. (2) at neighborhood level, correlations are not distance-dependent, on the contrary, highest co-occurrences appeared between distant neighborhoods and a polygon formed by close neighborhoods in downtown Monterrey. Moreover, (3) An elevated number of homicides occur close to the 85th freeway, which connects MMA with the US border. (4) Some socioeconomic barriers determine the presence of homicide violence. Finally, (5) we show a relation between homicidal crime and the urban landscape by studying the distance of safe and violent neighborhoods to the closest highway and by studying the evolution of highway and crime distance over the cartel-related years and the following period. With this approach, we are able to describe the spatial and temporal evolution of homicidal crime in a metropolitan area.
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spelling pubmed-77265752020-12-14 Eight years of homicide evolution in Monterrey, Mexico: a network approach Dorantes-Gilardi, Rodrigo García-Cortés, Diana Hernández-Ramos, Hiram Espinal-Enríquez, Jesús Sci Rep Article Homicide is without doubt one of Mexico’s most important security problems, with data showing that this dismal kind of violence sky-rocketed shortly after the war on drugs was declared in 2007. Since then, violent war-like zones have appeared and disappeared throughout Mexico, causing unfathomable human, social and economic losses. One of the most emblematic of these zones is the Monterrey metropolitan area (MMA), a central scenario in the narco-war. Being an important metropolitan area in Mexico and a business hub, MMA has counted hundreds to thousands of casualties. In spite of several approaches being developed to understand and analyze crime in general, and homicide in particular, the lack of accurate spatio-temporal homicide data results in incomplete descriptions. In order to describe the manner in which violence has evolved and spread in time and space through the city, here we propose a network-based approach. For this purpose, we define a homicide network where nodes are geographical entities that are connected through spatial and temporal relationships. We analyzed the time series of homicides in different municipalities and neighborhoods of the MMA, to observe whether or not a global correlation appeared. We studied the spatial correlation between neighborhoods where homicides took place, to observe whether distance is a factor of influence in the frequency of homicides. We constructed yearly co-occurrence networks, by correlating neighborhoods with homicides happening within a same week, and counting the co-occurrences of these neighborhood pairs in 1 year. We also constructed a crime network by aggregating all data of homicides, eliminating the temporal correlation, in order to observe whether homicide clusters appeared, and what those clusters were distributed geographically. Finally, we correlated the location and frequency of homicides with roads, freeways and highways, to observe if a trend in the homicidal violence appeared. Our network approach in the homicide evolution of MMA allows us to identify that (1) analyzing the whole 86-month period, we observed a correlation between close cities, which decreases in distant places. (2) at neighborhood level, correlations are not distance-dependent, on the contrary, highest co-occurrences appeared between distant neighborhoods and a polygon formed by close neighborhoods in downtown Monterrey. Moreover, (3) An elevated number of homicides occur close to the 85th freeway, which connects MMA with the US border. (4) Some socioeconomic barriers determine the presence of homicide violence. Finally, (5) we show a relation between homicidal crime and the urban landscape by studying the distance of safe and violent neighborhoods to the closest highway and by studying the evolution of highway and crime distance over the cartel-related years and the following period. With this approach, we are able to describe the spatial and temporal evolution of homicidal crime in a metropolitan area. Nature Publishing Group UK 2020-12-09 /pmc/articles/PMC7726575/ /pubmed/33299031 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-78352-9 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
Dorantes-Gilardi, Rodrigo
García-Cortés, Diana
Hernández-Ramos, Hiram
Espinal-Enríquez, Jesús
Eight years of homicide evolution in Monterrey, Mexico: a network approach
title Eight years of homicide evolution in Monterrey, Mexico: a network approach
title_full Eight years of homicide evolution in Monterrey, Mexico: a network approach
title_fullStr Eight years of homicide evolution in Monterrey, Mexico: a network approach
title_full_unstemmed Eight years of homicide evolution in Monterrey, Mexico: a network approach
title_short Eight years of homicide evolution in Monterrey, Mexico: a network approach
title_sort eight years of homicide evolution in monterrey, mexico: a network approach
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7726575/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33299031
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-78352-9
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