Crime and Professional Sporting Events

This blog is a part of our series, “Perspectives in Crime” where we explore leading academic studies that touch on crime data.

Professional sports games are important community and economic events within cities. All major professional sports leagues in the United States produce annual revenues of billions of dollars and provide many employment opportunities. Games bring together thousands of people from metro areas in stadiums with additional gatherings at bars in their surrounding areas. Periodically, in the aftermath of games, there is downtown rioting and property destruction, which can result in costly property crime and receive noteworthy media attention.  

But what is the real crime impact of sporting events in cities? A growing body of scholarship investigates this question, producing evidence that can help city organizers, law enforcement, and private entities near stadiums to anticipate how sporting events may affect crime. From the perspective of Routine Activities Theory, sporting events congregate a large number of potential victims and offenders and has the capacity to strain capable guardianship. There is often a diversion of law enforcement to stadium areas to deal with the influx of traffic, as well as many residences may be empty as people go out to watch the game. In addition, alcoholic consumption usually increases during sporting events, and prior research has shown that consuming alcohol increases the likelihood of an individual become a victim or an offender.  

Property crime, alcohol-related disorder crimes, and assaults on home game days

Two studies authored by Kristina Block approach the question of city level changes in crime during and after hockey games. The first analyzes regular season home games, while the second paper, co-authored with Jacob Kaplan, focuses on home playoff games. Both papers leverage incident-level crime data from multiple cities where National Hockey League game data was also available, analyzing changes in crime levels for property crimes, alcohol-related/public disorder crimes, and assaults. Where past studies exploring the same question have observed all crimes taking place during the game day, both studies note the specific game start time and measure crime during and after the event. Researchers used away games within the sample cities as a control to contrast the impact of a stadium’s concentration of people moving in and out of a downtown area. 

Block’s study of regular season games observed data in the four most populated cities with NHL teams and publicly available incident-level crime data: Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. The study analyzed the 2015-2016 season through the 2018-2019 season. Every season each team plays 41 home games and 41 away games. 

Block’s analysis found a 7.4% increase in property crimes and 9.7% increase in assaults during regular season home games as compared to away games. Block highlights different characteristics of the sample cities that could alter the game day crime trajectories. For instance, Boston and Philadelphia have smaller populations compared to the other included cities, so game day attendance, which caps at about 21,000 people in each studied city, affects a larger percentage of the population. Additional circumstances, such as access to public transportation and where a stadium is located in relation to downtown, have a capacity to determine the size of criminogenic effects on home game days.  

Playoff games and crime

Block and Kaplan’s study of home playoff games performs similar analysis of home game and away game conditions leveraged with incident level crime data focused on crime changes during and after games. Playoff games draw the largest audience and are characteristically most associated with after game riots, with notable modern examples across Canada and the United States. Playoff games are also scheduled in a much shorter term and played over the course of three months, where the regular season runs over 7 months.

Block and Kaplan’s paper included a greater number of cities, observing playoff and crime data for a period of seven years from 15 cities, including Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Nashville, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Raleigh, Saint Paul, San Jose, St. Louis, and Washington D.C.

This study focused on assaults, property crimes, and disorder crimes. In their analysis, Block and Kaplan found a 7% increase in disorder crimes and a 4% increase in property crimes during home playoff games across the cumulative effect of all studied cities. (The authors found a modest increase in assaults, though not statistically significant.) Figure 1 shows the net results of crime change on home playoff game days.

More traffic, more people, more crime

Sports games and other large events that congregate thousands of people together have the capacity to challenge the capable guardianship of police ad private security entities and accelerate criminogenic conditions city-wide. Large influxes of people create more potential offenders and victims, and the increased alcohol consumption raises the likelihood of an individual becoming an offender or a victim. In the case of sports games, this can occasionally result in media charismatic instances of widespread violence and property damage (i.e., rioting) but also more continuously in a temporary city-wide crime increase. Firms and decision makers should be aware of the proximal risk they face from these events and take extra steps to ensure security and safety. Pinkerton is adept at analyzing risk and producing protective solutions to maintain the value, safety, and duty of care of the firms we partner with.