Look what the hurricanes just blew in: analyzing the impact of the storm on criminal activities

Crime Watch: Hurricanes and Illegal Activities

“…According to Table , hurricanes positively impacts aggravated assault, indicating that crimes involving bodily harm inflicted upon a person for the average (maximum) storm increases by 0.5% (4.4%). Such significant increases have also been noted by Spencer () for Florida. Despite the absence of the joint significance with our hurricane variable, we see that individually, storm warnings do play a role in reducing aggravated assault when an average hurricane strikes, an amount equal to about 3%.…”

“…For robberies, we find that these fall by about 7% during an average storm, but these reduction are roughly eight times larger reduction for strongest storm (Table 6). This finding lies in contrast to Spencer (2017), who discovered an increase in robbery of 1550 per 100,000 inhabitants for Florida after hurricanes. The overall reduction in robberies has to do with the effect of storm warnings issued.…”

“…Despite the absence of the joint significance with our hurricane variable, we see that individually, storm warnings do play a role in reducing aggravated assault when an average hurricane strikes, an amount equal to about 3%. Likewise, there is a significant positive coefficient for the break‐in category implying that the unlawful entry of homes or other buildings with the intent to commit a wrongdoing increases with hurricane strikes (Leitner and Helbich ; Spencer ). Quantitatively, the average hurricane strike increases break‐ins by approximately 33% with the most damaging storm observed over our sample period causing increases by more than 270% (see Table ).…”

“…First, we unlike previous studies on the topic construct a hurricane wind field model-based measure of destruction that takes into account the local heterogeneity in the effects of the storm itself, as well as the assets and population exposed to it. This lies in contrast to previous studies that have either used hurricane incidence variables to capture disaster effects (Leitner and Helbich 2010;Varano et al 2010;Spencer 2017) or disaster frequency variables (Zahran, Shelley, and Peek 2009). Second, we not only have access to high-frequency, that is, daily crime data, but these are disaggregated by several crime types.…”

“…This can have serious implications for policy as it likely places a strain on the allocation of public resources in order to mitigate the impact of crimes emanating from natural disasters. As a matter of fact, a large amount of the literature seems to provide evidence that the likelihood and intensity of criminal acts will increase with natural disasters, which underscores the importance of addressing disaster‐generated crimes; see, for instance, Spencer (), Leitner and Helbich (), and Zahran, Shelley, and Peek (). Although most of the studies on the topic focus on changes in temperature and rainfall, other climatic factors, such as tropical cyclones, also play a role.…”