Browsing by Author "Cheng, T"

Now showing 1 - 10 of 10
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    Intersectional Burdens: How Social Location Shapes Interactions with the Administrative State
    (RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 2024-09) Beardall, TR; Mueller, C; Cheng, T
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    Recruitment through Rule Breaking: Establishing Social Ties with Gang Members
    (City & Community, 2018-03) Cheng, T
    Many contemporary violence prevention programs direct concentrated law enforcement, social service, or educational attention toward individuals engaged in violence, and yet, this population is often avoiding this precise attention. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic data, this case study asks: How do street outreach workers form social ties with active gang members? This study identifies three key mechanisms of social tie formation that break organizational rules, but account for how new social relations are formed with street savvy gang youth: (1) Network Targeting: identifying, entering, and extending services to the package of preexisting social ties beyond the eligible gang member; (2) Gift Giving: navigating those social ties when transferring out of pocket gifts to the target to elicit trust and demonstrate genuine investment; and (3) Transportation Brokerage: expanding clients’ social networks by literally driving them to prosocial influences and activities. Discussion of the value and limitations of each mechanism offers insights to urban sociologists interested in the origins of social ties in disadvantaged communities, as well as policymakers designing social interventions for hard to reach populations.
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    Regulatory intermediaries and the challenge of democratic policing
    (Criminology & Public Policy, 2022-02) Cheng, T; Qu, J
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    Service Cynicism: How Civic Disengagement Develops
    (Politics & Society, 2018-03) Cheng, T; Liu, S
    How does civic disengagement develop? This article examines the theory that the dissatisfaction and disengagement citizens develop toward one government agency can extend to an alternative agency. Leveraging police precinct-level data on 311 calls and criminal complaints from 2004 to 2012 in New York City, it investigates whether government responsiveness to municipal issues predicts citizens’ willingness to submit criminal complaints to the police. The study finds that predictors of disengagement with law enforcement extend beyond negative interactions with law enforcement alone. Rather, the time it takes local government officials to fix a 311 request for services, such as filling potholes and abating noise, shapes the likelihood that residents will file misdemeanor criminal complaints. Thus policymakers must account for the policy environment beyond their agency’s domain to alleviate citizens’ dissatisfaction and disengagement with government overall.
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    Settling institutional uncertainty: Policing Chicago and New York, 1877–1923
    (Criminology, 2023-01-01) Koehler, J; Cheng, T
    We show how both the Chicago Police Department and the New York Police Department sought to settle uncertainty about their propriety and purpose during a period when abrupt transformations destabilized urban order and called the police mandate into question. By comparing annual reports that the Chicago Police Department and the New York Police Department published from 1877 to 1923, we observe two techniques in how the police enacted that settlement: identification of the problems that the police believed themselves uniquely well equipped to manage and authorization of the powers necessary to do so. Comparison of identification and authorization yields insights into the role that these police departments played in convergent and divergent constructions of disorder and, in turn, into Progressivism's varying effects in early urban policing.
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    The Cumulative Discretion of Police over Community Complaints
    (American Journal of Sociology, 2022-05-01) Cheng, T
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    Understanding the Crime Gap: Violence and Inequality in an American City
    (City & Community, 2018-12) Papachristos, AV; Brazil, N; Cheng, T
    The United States has experienced an unprecedented decline in violent crime over the last two decades. Throughout this decline, however, violent crime continued to concentrate in socially and economically disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. Using detailed homicide records from 1990 to 2010, this study examines the spatial patterning of violent crime in Chicago to determine whether or not all neighborhoods experienced decreases in violence. We find that while in absolute terms nearly all neighborhoods in the city benefited from reductions in homicide, relative inequality in crime between the city's safest and most dangerous neighborhoods actually increased by 10 percent. This increase was driven by a greater rate of decline in the city's safest neighborhoods. This crime gap can be partly attributed to the decreasing association between concentrated disadvantage and homicide in the safest neighborhoods. We also find that the decline did not significantly alter the spatial distribution of crime, as homicides remained concentrated in the initially most dangerous neighborhoods and their adjacent areas.
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    Violence Prevention and Targeting the Elusive Gang Member
    (Law & Society Review, 2017-03) Cheng, T