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Do sports stadiums generate crime on days without matches? A natural experiment on the delayed exploitation of criminal opportunities

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Abstract

Crime pattern theory claims that busy places generate crime through immediate and delayed exploitation. In delayed exploitation, offenders notice criminal opportunities during opening hours but return to exploit them later. This study investigates delayed exploitation by testing whether soccer stadiums locally increase police-recorded property crime on non-game days. A soccer stadium closure created a natural experiment. We estimate linear regression difference-in-difference models to compare crime rates on non-game days around the stadium, before and after the closure. The closure reduced non-game day property crime beyond the citywide property crime drop. We conclude that criminogenic effects of busy places extend beyond their opening hours, confirming the delayed exploitation mechanism and that crime-prevention strategies should also target these places outside opening hours.

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Notes

  1. Crime pattern theory also includes ‘crime attractors,’ a concept that is not discussed here because it is irrelevant for our main line of argument.

  2. Later, Brantingham and Brantingham (2003, p. 147) added that “[d]elayed exploitation of a criminal opportunity discovered at a crime generator does not convert that location in a crime attractor”.

  3. We focus on property crime (burglary, shoplifting, theft from vehicle, and vehicle theft) because it is generally more premeditated than other crime types and therefore more susceptible to delayed exploitation. The large volume of property crime also makes it better suitable for rigorous statistical analysis than other crime types.

  4. Similar results were found for buffers with radii of 500, 750, and 1000 m.

  5. There are a limited number of property crime incidents recorded on a daily and a weekly basis in the stadium’s area. This prevents us from reliably estimating daily and weekly property crime trends. Instead, property crime counts are aggregated to monthly totals, and monthly property crime counts are considered in the analysis.

  6. Vehicle theft includes car, bike, moped, and motorcycle thefts.

  7. Soccer games continued to take place in Ghent after the stadium’s closure albeit on a different location. To ensure that property crime rates are computed similarly, game day crime is excluded in the pre- and post-intervention periods for the treatment and control areas. This guarantees similar conditions when comparing crime trends before and after the closure as well as between the treatment and control groups. For the sake of completeness: in the stadium’s surrounding area, we observed 0.51 property crimes per game day and 0.57 property crimes per non-game day before the stadium’s closure, and 0.47 property crimes per game day and 0.33 property crimes per non-game day after the closure. These rates suggest that for property crime, the immediate crime effect of the stadium is limited or nonexistent.

  8. Newey–West standard errors were estimated to address serial correlation and heteroscedasticity in our monthly property crime data (Newey and West 1986).

  9. An unequal variances-paired samples t test confirms that this difference is statistically significant (t = 4.53, p < 0.001 one-sided). Test statistics are computed one-sided since we previously specified directional hypotheses: we assume that the removal of a soccer stadium in an area leads to a decrease in crime.

  10. Simultaneous area-level change was the main reason to refrain from analyzing delayed exploitation around the new stadium. The new stadium was built in a multipurpose commercial area that underwent considerable change during and after the stadium’s construction. This makes it difficult to attribute any crime changes in the area to the opening of the stadium and its visitors. Moreover, the new stadium is consumer oriented and hosts other event types that attract visitors on non-game days as well, making it difficult to unambiguously detect delayed exploitation around the new stadium.

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Acknowledgements

Christophe Vandeviver is a postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO). Part of this work was carried out while Christophe Vandeviver was an International Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR).

Funding

Christophe Vandeviver’s contribution to this study was funded by the Research Foundation’s – Flanders (FWO) Postdoctoral Fellowship funding scheme and the Research Foundation’s – Flanders (FWO) Long Stay Abroad funding scheme [FWO15/PDO/242 to C.V., V4.303.16 N to C.V.].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Criminology, Criminal Law and Social Law, Ghent University, Universiteitstraat 4, 9000, Ghent, Belgium

    Christophe Vandeviver & Stijn Van Daele

  2. Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), Brussels, Belgium

    Christophe Vandeviver

  3. Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR), Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Wim Bernasco

  4. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Wim Bernasco

  5. Ghent University Hospital, Ghent, Belgium

    Stijn Van Daele

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  1. Christophe Vandeviver
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Correspondence to Christophe Vandeviver.

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Vandeviver, C., Bernasco, W. & Van Daele, S. Do sports stadiums generate crime on days without matches? A natural experiment on the delayed exploitation of criminal opportunities. Secur J 32, 1–19 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41284-018-0142-5

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