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AbstractFrom theoretical physics to field‐driven anthropology, researchers are increasingly exploring how the connections among individuals, amoebas, brain cells, organizations, and institutions affect what we feel, think, and do. However, the application of social network analysis to the study of crime, deviance, and violence has arrived a bit late to this network turn in the social and behavioral science. I argue that this network turn in the social sciences be an important turning point in the study of crime and deviance, but only if taken as an opportunity to evaluate our core theoretical principles and consider new ways to understand and measure them. The goal of this essay is to take stock of the state of the field, while also providing a moment of pause to consider some fruitful ways of advancing this line of inquiry.

Examines the relationship between globalization and street gangs, arguing that gangs are global phenomena not because they have become transnational criminal organizations but because members and their culture have become hypermobile. The proliferation of gangs throughout the US is described. This trend repeats internationally, particularly in Latin America and Asia, where gang culture is spread and links between gang members established. US immigration policy has helped spur this by deporting thousands of gang members to countries ill equipped to address the flow. The Internet is seen to foster a virtual sort of gang warfare as well as copycat gangs unable to live historically or geographically the local meanings found in the names of the gangs they co-opt. This kind of proliferation might give the false impression of global reach for gangs. However, there is potential for gangs to carry on illicit activities on the Web; distinguishing between the banal and the dangerous will be a key task in the future. Globalization's ongoing impact will determine how gangs continue to proliferate; most gangs are not dangerous criminal organizations and should not be treated as such.

This study applies the growing field of network science to explore whether police violence is associated with characteristics of an officer's social networks and his or her placement within those networks. To do this, we re-create the network of police misconduct for the Chicago Police Department using more than 38,442 complaints filed against police officers between 2000 and 2003. Our statistical models reveal that officers who shoot at civilians are often "brokers" within the social networks of policing, occupying important positions between other actors in the network and often connecting otherwise disconnected parts of the social structure between other officers within larger networks of misconduct. This finding holds, even net measures of officer activity, career movement, and sociodemographic background. Our finding suggest that policies and interventions aimed at curbing police shootings should include not only individual assessments of risk but also an understanding of officers' positions within larger social networks.

Public fascination with organized crime is not new. In new research which studies the social relationships of organized crime in Chicago in the 1920s, Chris M. Smith and Andrew V. Papachristos were able to take advantage of this fascination with the availability of thousands of notes and documents on Al Capone's criminal network. By applying network analysis to the criminal relationships in Capone's gangs they find that multiplexity – when two people have more than one relationship – was a rare but very relevant part of Chicago's Prohibition era network. Their research highlight the ways that multiplexity links the underworld and the upper world — a process that organizes crime into mainstream society.

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.