UC Irvine

Social networks have always an important place in criminological theories. Despite their clear theoretical importance in explanations of crime and criminal behavior, social networks are all too often measured indirectly or not at all. Social network analysis (SNA) provides scholars with a set of measures, techniques, and models to directly investigate the impact of networks on behaviors but criminologists have taken longer than scholars in other fields to adopt SNA. Recently, scholars have begun using arrest and Field interview (FI) records to extract relationships between individuals encountered by the police. This dissertation provides a first critical analysis of the implications of using police records to study criminal social networks. I examine to what extent these networks reflect the behaviors of actors involved in them or the behaviors of organizations that observe them. I provide an in-depth description of the nature and content of arrest and FI records that are critical to the construction of social networks. I explore sources of variations in police records based on police organizational changes such as changes in leadership, and reduction in the size of the police force, and police adaptations to important legal changes that occurred in recent years in California. I also test the influence of civil gang injunctions on both the patterns of associations of gang members targeted by them and the behavior of officers enforcing the injunctions. I discuss the implications of using these records to measure criminal social networks.