Professional sports and crime: Do professional hockey games increase city-level crime rates?
Published in Crime & Delinquency, 2021
Previous research has found that sports games increase certain crimes including theft and vandalism, but the relationship between sports and other offenses such as motor vehicle theft, robbery, and assaults is mixed. Using regular season National Hockey League (NHL) game data and city-level, incident-level crime data from four large U.S. cities, this paper estimates if professional ice hockey games played at home is associated with increases in property crimes, alcohol-related crimes, and assaults during and right after games the over course of four NHL seasons. Results show that NHL games lead to small but significant increases in property crimes and assaults. There is no significant effect for alcohol-related crimes. Implications and suggestions for future work are discussed.
Media Coverage: New York Times
Winner of the 2021 American Society of Criminology’s Division of Experimental Criminology’s Student Paper Award
Recommended citation: Block, K. (2021). Professional sports and crime: Do professional hockey games increase city-level crime rates? Crime & Delinquency, 67(12), 2069–2087.
Link to Paper