A few days ago, Levitt blogged about an interesting study finding that violent movies reduce crime (at least in the short run). The reason, according to the study’s authors, Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna, is simply that more violent movies means fewer drunken louts on the streets. It is simply an incapacitation effect.
One way of testing this hypothesis would be to look for the opposite type of experiment: What puts more drunken louts on the streets?
Two words: college football. Or, at least, that is the focus of a new study by Daniel Rees and Kevin Schnepel linking crime and sporting events. They analyze daily crime data, but instead of analyzing the changes around the release of new movies, they look to see what happens on game day. Their findings are quite striking, and they report large rises in assaults, vandalism, and disorderly conduct on game days. As might be expected, this effect is large in the city of the home team, but basically non-existent in the city of the visitors.
You might be worried that this rise in arrests reflects more police on the street on game day (and hence more arrests per crime), rather than simply more crime. But the authors provide a clever response, noting that upset losses by the home team have a particularly large effect on violent assaults, while expected losses have little effect. Unless police chiefs are also successfully forecasting football outcomes, it seems that this alternative explanation doesn’t hold water.
The effects here are pretty large, and the study is quite convincing. It is worth noting that these results occur despite the fact that the football programs they analyze ban the sale of alcohol in the stadium.
There’s a nice back story here, too. Schnepel is an undergraduate student, who got to thinking about this question while sitting in Rees’ class on the economics of crime. Soon enough, an idea became some explanatory regressions, and then a co-authorship, and now, an interesting paper. And all this happened in time for Schnepel to boast about it on his grad school application (which I look forward to reading!). [Correction: Schnepel is in fact a current graduate student in economics at the University of Colorado, Denver. Though we'd still love to get a look at his application.]
Putting the Rees-Schnepel and the Dahl-DellaVigna studies together, the policy implications seem pretty obvious: we want to engage aggressive young men in activities that amuse them (like movies), but don’t provide an outlet for violence (like a football game). This seems pretty obvious, but then it got me wondering: why do violent movies lead us to sit quietly and stare at the screen, while football leads us to get out of our seats and begin the biffo? A general theory here may well suggest broader policy implications from these sorts of studies.
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I would guess, as well, that alcohol and large group behavior should be investigated as potential causes. Probably the former more than the latter. This is a very interesting finding, however; are there any studies that anyone knows of investigating smaller groups than football game audiences that exhibit this effect?
How about audiences at completely (or mostly) sober games?
Also, to the above comment, only if the Barbies are drunk and in large competitive groups.
Quite frankly its because sports are boring.
@1 If that were true, video games would cause higher crime. Every time you get a game over screen you don’t go commit a violent crime do you?
However pro video game activists do cite a lower violent crime rate corresponding over the rise of popularity of video games (i.e. the 90s, although reading Freakonomics I know of at least one other plausible explanation). They also hold that games have gotten easier over the years. Would harder games, with a more uncertain outcome and a greater chance to lose lead to more crime?
There was a football strike in 1982. I was a resident in an emergency room and noted that there seemed to an increase in domestic violence when games that had previously been scheduled were NOT played. Could football games promised but denied increase violence?
This overlooks something important. In many college towns 50k to 90k visitors come for the game. It does not strike me as noteworthy that a college town with a population of 50,000 has more crime when its population swells to 125,000 for the Saturday game.
Maybe the next study should be done on the endorphins from being active, the discipline from being on a team, and the social experiences people get from engaging in team unity and school spirit. With all of these I wonder if it is overall more beneficial to attend a football game than sit stagnant for two hours watching violent images and eating over priced candy.
So based on this evidence, should we have age restrictions for football games? 18+ only?
I doubt there’s a correlation between the event. As someone said earlier, I’m sure a study would show that 50,000 drunks attending a violent movie would have a higher rate of crime as well.
Things to consider:
1. What’s it like at a BYU home game? They are the most sober school in the nation.
2. If there is an increase in crime, is it the BYU fan or visitor who committed the act?
3. In the previous study, is there any correlation between those arrested and whether or not they actually attended the game? I’m guessing not, but probably between their behavior and alcohol consumed.
You may also want to think about Todd Kendall’s paper on pornography and rape when you think about this. He finds increased access to Internet porn associated with decreased reported rapes and STDs in a community. That too seems to fit with these bundle of papers showing it may be important to find ways of incapacitating violent people in ways that let them satisfy their demand for violence in a private, rather than public, manner.