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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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It does, but in the opposite direction from your hypothesis.

Yes, and if that generalizes to other cities and is a big enough correlation then that's a good argument for walkability. But I don't think the data in that paper supports this claim - with WalkScore as the independent variable, these are the standardized betas for different kinds of crime:

  1. Property crimes per 100,000 residents, 2004, by LMPD district: -0.026

  2. Violent crimes per 100,000 residents, 2004, by LMPD district: -0.039

  3. Total crimes per 100,000 residents 2007: 22.034 !!!

  4. Murders per 100,000 residents, 2004, by LMPD district: -0.068

I'm assuming that there's an error in the "total crimes" statistic considering its magnitude, but regardless, the other correlations are low and not statistically significant. (I'm having a hard time interpreting that table - some of the signs of the unstandardized coefficients are different from their standardized betas, and the magnitudes of the betas are much larger than the others which suggests maybe they've standardized the independent variables but not the dependent variables, since the total in category 3 is much larger corresponding to the larger standardized betas).