What if you could predict your chances of being shot from your social network: who you know and how you know them?

Andrew Papachristos points out that, in the West Side of Chicago, almost all the residents share the “risk factors” for getting caught up in violent crime, and yet “most of the people in those communities don’t get shot.”

The secret to understanding how violent crime spreads, he says, may lie in social network analysis.

Papachristos compares violence to a specifically bloodborne pathogen: You can’t catch it from just anyone, he argues. Your relationship with the people involved matters.

Via The Atlantic.