Registering a proposed business reduces police stops of innocent people? Reconsidering the effects of strip clubs on sex crimes found in Ciacci & Sviatschi’s study of New York City

ABSTRACT

Ciacci & Sviatschi’s ‘The Effect of Adult Entertainment Establishments on Sex Crime: Evidence from New York City,’ published in The Economic Journal, concluded that opening new adult entertainment businesses reduces sex crimes, with the most compelling finding that ‘[strip clubs, gentleman’s clubs, and escort services] decrease sex crime by 13% per police precinct one week after the opening.’ We contend that the study’s conclusions speak beyond the data, which cannot support these findings because they do not measure the necessary variables. The study uses the date a business is registered with New York State as a proxy for its opening date, but the actual date of opening comes weeks or months later, after requirements such as inspections, licensure, and community board approval. The study then uses police Stop, Question and Frisk Reports as data about subsequent crimes. As reports created to memorialize forcible police stops based on less than probable cause, 94% of these reports document that the police had an unfounded belief in criminal activity, and the person stopped was innocent of any crime. In effect, what the study has done is measure changes in police encounters with innocent people in the week after an entity has filed the paperwork that will eventually allow it to open as a business. The study lacks construct validity, cannot reject the null hypothesis of its most important finding, and its methods fall short of the rigor necessary to permit replication.

KEYWORDS:

• Sex crime
• sex work
• stop and frisk
• police
• law enforcement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Patrol Services Bureau of the New York City Police Department divides the city into 77 precincts (see p. 2 of Ciacci and Sviatschi (2021)), with a mean population of 110,000 residents (i.e., New York City’s 2021 population of 8.46 million divided by 77). The study asserts that the opening of one adult entertainment establishment has a marginal effect of significantly reducing sex crimes among this mean population within a week.

2. In the references to Ciacci and Sviatschi (2021) here, we provide page numbers for the PDF of the paper published in its final form in The Economic Journal.

3. https://www.superpages.com/search?search_terms=strip+club&geo_location_terms=New+York%2C+NY

4. https://www.superpages.com/search?search_terms=escort&geo_location_terms= New+York+City%2C+NY

5. https://www.superpages.com/search?search_terms=Gentlemen%27s+Club&geo_location_terms=New+York%2C+NY

6. https://www.yellowpages.com/search?search_terms=strip+club&geo_location_terms=New+York+City%2C+NY

7. https://www.yellowpages.com/search?search_terms=Gentlemen%27s+Club&geo_location_terms=New+York%2C+NY

8. https://www.yellowpages.com/search?search_terms=Escort+Service&geo_location_terms=New+York+City%2C+NY

9. See https://www.eros.com/new_york/new_york/eros.htm for one of many examples of services that operate citywide, outside the realm of this study, but bear heavily on its proposed causal model. Warning: sexually explicit content.

10. https://www1.nyc.gov/nycbusiness/startabusiness/bar

11. https://www1.nyc.gov/nycbusiness/startabusiness

12. https://www.businessexpress.ny.gov/app/answers/cms/a_id/3737/kw/on%20premises

13. https://sla.ny.gov/municipalcommunity-board-30-day-advance-notices-premises-applicants

14. To present this problem in an economical way, we have performed this analysis using the entire body of stop question and frisk reports, but we presume the percentages and trends discussed closely match the subcategory of sex crimes defined by the study; to our knowledge, no evidence exists that they do not. The stop, question and frisk data used in our analysis can be found here: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/stats/reports-analysis/stopfrisk.page. Mr. Donohue, Mr. Hall, and Dr. del Pozo were custodians and analysts of the NYPD’s SQF data during the period of the study.

Additional information

Funding

Dr. del Pozo was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse [grant K01DA056654]. The institute had no role in the conduct of the research or the preparation of its results for publication.

Notes on contributors

Brandon del Pozo

Brandon del Pozo, is an assistant professor of medicine and public health at Brown University. He came to research from 19 years in the New York City Police Department and four as the chief of police of Burlington, Vermont. He is an elected member of the Council on Criminal Justice, and an academic fellow at the Law Enforcement Advancing Data and Science program at the National Institute of Justice.

Peter Moskos

Peter Moskos, is a professor in the Department of Law, Police Science, and Criminal Justice Administration at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. A former Baltimore police officer, Moskos is also a faculty member in CUNY’s Doctoral Program in Sociology, has taught introductory classes at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, and is a Senior Fellow of the Yale Urban Ethnography Project.

John K. Donohue

John K. Donohue, is a fellow at Rutgers University’s Center on Policing. In his 32 years with the NYPD, he held every rank from cadet to chief, concluding his career as the commanding officer of the Office of Management Analysis and planning, and as the Chief of Strategic Initiatives. As an executive, Donohue led multidisciplinary teams to identify challenges and solutions to effectiveness and efficiency in policing, prosecutions, courts, school safety, and intelligence.

John Hall

John Hall, is a captain and the commander of the crime strategies unit in the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority Police Department. Prior to this role in this agency, he served as a patrol officer, detective, precinct commander, and an executive in the Office of Crime Control Strategies in the New York City Police Department, where he analyzed police administrative data for planning and strategy purposes.