Street lighting, illuminated walk/don’t walk signs, painted crosswalks, public transportation, community parks, and maintained vacant lots are associated with significant decreased likelihood of homicide among youth in a city neighborhood, according to a study published today in JAMA Pediatrics from researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). The findings offer implications for future randomized intervention trials to reduce youth violence by revitalizing neighborhoods. 

Homicide was the cause of 2043 deaths of adolescents in the United States in 2014, yet limited research exists on environmental changes that can make neighborhoods safer.  

“Modern medical advances have reduced fatalities resulting from assaults cases, but medical teams and communities face the grim realities of what clinical medicine can achieve in saving critically injured patients,” said Charles C. Branas, PhD, a professor of Epidemiology, director of the Penn Injury Science Center and senior author on the study. “We must do what we can to prevent these homicides from occurring on the front end – and this research is part of that puzzle. By identifying attributes of communities and their association with homicides, these findings offer insights for targeted interventions to prevent violence.”

The team compared Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office data of 143 homicide victims ages 13 to 20 from 2010 to 2012 in Philadelphia with that of 155 matched control individuals of the same age range and outdoors in the city when the homicides occurred. They compared features of the immediate surroundings in locations where homicides occurred to the locations where control individuals were at the same time.

Field staff photographed the street corner closest to where the homicides occurred and the control locations and converted the images into 360-degree high resolution panoramas. Trained coders identified 60 visible elements of the built and social environments, such as broken sidewalks or trash, to develop a picture of environmental characteristics associated with the violence. The information was also supplemented by additional insights and details of each homicide from the Philadelphia Police Department. 

“This research is exciting because it provides an initial glimpse into specific modifiable neighborhood features that may put youth at risk of severe violent injury. While we can’t determine from this study if any of these features cause violence, it provides important insight into things we may want to target in future intervention trials,” according to the study’s lead author, Alison Culyba, MD, MPH, an adolescent medicine physician in the Craig-Dalsimer Division of Adolescent Medicine at CHOP and PhD candidate in Epidemiology at Perelman School of Medicine.  “Our research adds to a growing body of knowledge suggesting that modifying environmental risks for violence may provide opportunities for practical and sustainable interventions that can save lives.”

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