That's fine to say when there is another cause you can identify. For social statistics, most of the time it's people attributing two things together when the underlying cause is money.
In this case that's just a rationalization for what you want to be true.
This paper is literally just authors coming up with some model and simulating it, without any real world evidence whatsoever. It’s an argument from fictional evidence. Is this the best you can do?
There is a huge wealth of research on this topic, even if you want to reject it. Do you need a third, fourth, hundredth paper? Try reading past the abstract (and comprehending it)
Again, this paper just looks at the correlations, and does not touch causation at all. You can run a hundred studies, each of them finding high correlation between wet streets and having rained recently, but you cannot conclude from that that the wet streets caused the rain to fall.
Hi, all causation can be doubted- that's a key aspect of skepticism, and in general, is important for philosophical development. In this case, it's clear that it is not a substantive objection to these papers or others. It is clear that you have set out this discussion with prior belief and are trying to reject that wealth disparity drives crime. You're not acting in the spirit of skepticism (and only are applying skepticism selectively here, because you think it sounds smart).
Read the papers. Apply your logic evenhandedly. Follow the leads and research on your own. It may be scary- you may discover things that force you to change your life (or you may learn something about yourself you dislike).
