John Hipp, a professor of Criminology, Law, and Society at the University of California Irvine, did a study to test the effects of neighborhood inequality and heterogeneity on crime rates. Hipp gathered crime data from census tracts in nineteen cities in the year of 2000. Hipp found out that the effect of tract poverty on certain crimes such as robbery and murder becomes nonsignificant when the level of income inequality is taken into account. Hipp’s research was similar to that of Lens’ study. Both researchers focused part of their study on neighborhood inequality. However, Hipp’s study was weakened because he did not randomly choose cities and some of the crime data overlapped more than one census tract. Hipp’s work goes to prove that inequality
