Weapon Related Violence among Students in Philadelphia and Toronto: The Gang Connection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examined the extent of gang, weapons, and drug-selling activities among representative samples of high-school students in Toronto (Canada) and Philadelphia (Pennsylvania). The study found that students in both cities reported similar experiences regarding the frequency of weapon involvement and related violence. General similarities were found between the two samples regarding weapon-carrying behavior and experience with weapon-related violence. There were two significant shared predictors of violence: gang fighting and having friends who carry weapons. Similarities in the models for being on the giving or receiving ends of violence indicate some overlap in risk, rather than completely discrete groups of victims and predators. The strength of these two variables as separate contributors also suggests that weapons involvement in peer groups is not necessarily a mark of gang membership, but might be viewed as a unique indicator of propensity for violence. Gang fighting clearly emerged as a potent force for involvement both in victimization and predation with weapons. Although these youth were all enrolled in school, some were apparently involved in serious violence. Being Black in both cities as a marker of youth gang violence and links with other background factors - such as poverty, family instability, and poor school performance - warrants further examination. Drug selling did not emerge as a significant predictor of violence in either city, having only a minor role for explaining victimization in Toronto. Founding teams at the University of Delaware and the University of Toronto developed the common questionnaire and used consistent methods in surveying high school students. The student samples consisted of 9th to 12th graders in eight (Toronto) and seven (Philadelphia) schools. At the school level, 1 class was selected from each grade resulting in 4 representative classes per school (967 students in Toronto and 712 in Philadelphia). [NCJRS Abstract]
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".