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How do Visitors Affect Crime?

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Abstract

This paper, which uses data on National Park visitors between 1979 and 1998 and every county in the United States, is the most exhaustive examination to date of how visitors affect crime. After controlling for many other factors that influence crime, the county-level regressions consistently indicate that national park visitors have no effect on either property or violent crime. These results are true for a variety of different measures of park visitors, for different empirical specifications, and for different regression formats. We therefore conclude that some visitor types have no impact on crime. This conclusion sheds light on the empirical issue of whether only some types of recreational visitors increase crime or whether visitors, regardless of their type, necessarily increase crime.

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Notes

  1. See for example Mathematica (1970).

  2. Part I crimes are murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, automobile theft and arson. Part II crimes are other crimes against persons (e.g. assaults which are not of an aggravated nature, offenses against the family and children), public disorder crimes (e.g. vandalism, prostitution, drunkenness, vagrancy, loitering), drug and alcohol offenses, white collar crimes (forgery and counterfeiting, fraud, embezzlement), and all other crimes (e.g. buying/receiving/selling stolen property).

  3. D.K. Shifflet & Associates Ltd. suggested these three locations and provided the data to us.

  4. We contacted many agencies to obtain visitor data, including D.K. Shifflet & Associates Ltd, The Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, Clyde W. Barrow of the Center for Policy Analysis (UMass-Dartmouth), and others, but none were able to provide information of this type.

  5. U.S. National Parks Service, “Designation of National Parks System Units,” http://www.nps.gov/legacy/nomenclature.html.

  6. The FBI’s UCR Program is a nationwide, cooperative statistical effort of more than 17,000 city, university and college, county, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies reporting data on crimes brought to their attention. U.S. Department of Justice, FBI, Uniform Crime Reports: County-level Detailed Arrest and Offenses Data, 1978–1998, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, FBI. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR, distributor).

  7. In the U.S. there are two sources of national crime data. We cannot use the National Crime Survey (NCS) for two reasons. First, because of confidentiality concerns, the NCS does report the respondent’s county or city. Second, while the survey is a random sample nationwide, it is not random at the county or city level where some locations have very few-or even no-observations. We use the FBI UCR Index 1 crimes because while the FBI reports arrests for a wider variety of crimes, they only report the number of offenses for the Index 1 crimes. The definitions are listed in Crime in the United States: 1993 (U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation), Appendix H, 380–381.

  8. ICPSR (8384): “Intercensal Estimates of the Population of Counties by Age, Sex and Race (U.S.): 1970–80,” U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Winter 1985, ICPSR, Ann Arbor, MI 48106. “Intercensal Estimates of the Population of Counties by Age, Sex and Race: 1970–1980 Tape Technical Documentation,” U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Pop. Reports, Series P-23, 103, “Methodology for Experimental Estimates of the Population of Counties by Age and Sex: July 1, 1975.” U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Population, 1980: “County Population by Age, Sex, Race and Spanish Origin” (Preliminary OMB-Consistent Modified Race).

  9. The arrest rate is undefined when there are 0 offenses for a given crime type. Many small counties record no offenses even for property crimes for a given year, and even large counties frequently record no offenses for murder and rape. For some offenses including the arrest rate eliminated over 20,000 observations.

  10. Stata command “weight = county population.”

  11. In addition to the “wrong” sign and non-corroboration by the structural equation, we note that even if the null hypothesis of no effect is true, the expectation is that one in twenty independent regressions will result in a coefficient significant at the 5% level. We ran 28 regressions, resulting in one significant at the 5.8% level.

  12. Although we have attempted to be exhaustive in our use of available data, we do not mean to minimize the data limitations that remain. As an anonymous referee points out, “One might, for example, expect that public order crimes (i.e. disorderly conduct, liquor law violations) and possibly DUI and drug violation might increase as vacationing visitors enter a venue.” Since these and other crimes are not included in the present study we are unable to make conclusions that apply to them.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Hankamer School of Business, Baylor University, One Bear Place, # 98003, Waco, TX, 76798, USA

    Earl L. Grinols

  2. Department of Economics, Terry College of Business, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, 30602, USA

    David B. Mustard

  3. UGA Institute of Higher Education, Athens, GA, 30602, USA

    David B. Mustard

  4. Institute for the Study of Labor, Bonn, Germany

    David B. Mustard

  5. Catlin Inc., 3340 Peachtree Road NE, Tower Place 100, Suite 2950, Atlanta, GA, 30326, USA

    Melissa Staha

Authors
  1. Earl L. Grinols
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  2. David B. Mustard
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  3. Melissa Staha
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Correspondence to David B. Mustard.

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Grinols, E.L., Mustard, D.B. & Staha, M. How do Visitors Affect Crime?. J Quant Criminol 27, 363–378 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-010-9128-0

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