Athletic contests and individual robberies: an analysis based on hourly crime data

ABSTRACT

Using hourly data on individual robberies, this article employs a novel approach to investigate the relationship between athletic contests and individual robberies in Memphis, Tennessee, a well-known entertainment destination, with its iconic Beale Street locale, in the US. Empirical results indicate that home basketball games hosted by the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies and those hosted by the University of Memphis Tigers are associated with increases in individual robberies, while away games are not associated with such an increase. This finding is consistent with the hot spot theory of crime, as large numbers of individuals travel to the games, thus providing additional opportunities for crime.

KEYWORDS:

• Economics of crime
• sports economics
• regional economics

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J01
• J20
• R0

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to two anonymous referees of this journal and to Bianca Biagi for many helpful suggestions. The usual caveat applies.

Notes

¹ Relatedly, Poutvaara and Priks (2009) examine how the incidence of hooliganism can be affected by the nature of police intervention.

² Marie (2015) uses hourly crime data, aggregated into four equal 6-hour intervals, along with borough-level data on property crimes (e.g. burglaries, theft and handling of stolen goods, and criminal damage) and violent crimes (i.e. violence against the person, sexual offenses and robberies).

³ By ‘fans’ we are referring to those individuals travelling to the venues as opposed to watching on television.

⁴ In the case of the Memphis Grizzlies, identification of a ‘games effect’ is facilitated by a lockout that resulted in the cancellation of nearly all of the fall NBA games in 2011. As we do have data on the fall games for the other year in our study, we have a unique set of controls for the Grizzlies games.

⁵ Even with a rich data set such as ours, explaining the number of crimes in an hour is a difficult task. Unfortunately, we do not have information on the location of the police, the location of the crime or the nature of the victim (i.e. fan or nonfan).

⁶ Although we have information on other crimes, we focus on individual robbery because it is the only crime which involves significant travel by fans for our sample, allowing us to examine a hot spot effect.

⁷ We also construct home and away variables for the Memphis Tigers football games, but the games are few and the fan interest is limited so we do not discuss these variables in the article.

⁸ In terms of the economics of crime, the bright light from a full moon should increase the probability of detection and successful prosecution, thus increasing the expected cost of criminal activity.

⁹ Data on phases of moon are available on the US Naval Observatory Astronomical Applications Department website. Thus, after obtaining the exact hour and minute of Full Moon, we also interact Full Moon with hour of the day.

¹⁰ Unfortunately, the sheer number of control variables employed in our study precludes, in the effort to economize on publication space, provision of the descriptive statistics for the control variables in either Table 1 or in an appendix to this study. The authors will, however, provide these upon request.

¹¹ These marginal effects are interpreted as are OLS coefficients in a linear model.

¹² This result (i.e. 19%) is found by dividing the estimated marginal effect by the sample mean for individual robberies.