Crime Exchange: A Metric to Evaluate Group Sizes and Crime Rates

Lars H. Andersen , Rockwool Foundation Research Unit
Torben Tranæs, VIVE - the Danish Center for Social Science Research

Crime rates are among the central symptoms of challenges to the social integration of racial/ethnic groups in both the US and the EU. We contribute to research on the racial/ethnic patterning of crime by focusing on victimization. We develop metrics to analyze the amount of “crime exchange” that occurs within and between racial/ethnic groups, and we apply these metrics to administrative data on all cases of violence in Denmark in 2001-2015. Results show that higher minority offense rates do not materialize as substantially higher victimization risks for the majority population. In fact, the overarching conclusion from our benchmarking exercise is that excess minority criminality is predominantly an in-group phenomenon, causing higher victimization rates among the group itself. Trends in the crime exchanges during 2001–2015 indicate, however, that social integration (in terms of violent crimes) increases over this period.

See paper

 Presented in Session 80. Flash Session: Innovation in Demographic Methods