How to Fight Crime with Your Television

A new study linking decreased crime rates with major televised sports events suggests that crime—some of it anyway—can...
A new study linking decreased crime rates with major televised sports events suggests that crime—some of it, anyway—can be addressed as a time-management problem.Illustration by Simon Landrein

For decades, politicians, parents, and scholars have fretted over the link between what people watch and how people act. First, it was movies, then television, and now it’s video games, too. “Violent video games increase aggressive behavior as much as lead exposure decreases children’s I.Q. scores,” Hillary Clinton declared, in 2005, while promoting a bill to ban the sale of such games to minors. Donald Trump drew a similar connection in March, after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. “I’m hearing more and more people saying the level of violence in video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts,” he told state officials.

There’s a kernel of truth to this, but it has less to do with the content of any particular games than with the time spent immersed in the medium. Studies have shown that excessive video-game playing can lead to anxiety and depression, and the World Health Organization recently added “gaming disorder” to its International Classification of Diseases manual. The actual research linking violent media to aggressive behavior is less than damning. Lab experiments have found that people who watch violent video clips or play violent video games are more likely, in the hours afterward, to be aggressive—but these studies are conducted in artificial settings, and many researchers aren’t persuaded that the findings apply to the real world. In 2010, a review of the literature in Psychological Bulletin called the alleged link between content and behavior “much ado about nothing.”

Scholars have found more intriguing results by turning the question on its head: How does what we view affect what we don’t do? In recent years, several studies have concluded that any aggression provoked by violent media is more than offset by decreases in violent crime that can be attributed to the same media. One study, in 2009, examined crime rates in the U.S. from 1996 to 2004. On the nights when theatre attendance for violent blockbuster movies, including “Hannibal” and “Spider-Man,” was high, rates of violent crime fell slightly, even in the six-hour period after midnight, when most movies had ended. Apparently, the people who were prone to violence were more likely to see a violent movie, and this kept them from committing crimes. (Nonviolent movies, such as “Runaway Bride,” were not accompanied by a drop in violent crimes.)

Video games seem to have a similar effect. In 2011, Michael Ward, an economist at the University of Texas at Arlington, along with two colleagues, examined data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System between 2005 and 2008 and compared the weekly incidence of violent crimes to the retail sales of the fifty top-selling video games. They found that increased sales of violent games corresponded to slight drops in the crime rate, but the same was not true of nonviolent games. In a separate study, they found that for every one-per-cent increase in the number of video-game stores in a given U.S. county, the crime rate fell by a tenth of a percentage point—a small decline, to be sure, but not the increase that one might expect.

Lately, researchers have wondered whether the diversionary benefits of our screens apply more broadly. In both the U.S. and Canada, crime rates have dropped steadily for the past twenty years—a period corresponding to the rise not only of video games but of social media, smartphones, YouTube, and streaming television. The idea goes by several names—the crime-substitute hypothesis, routine-activity theory—but the gist is the same: people have found better things to do than commit crime, and those activities involve screens. Would-be criminals, the thought goes, are too busy watching “Game of Thrones” and texting their pals to stir up trouble in the real world.

Proponents of the idea are quick to concede that the link between screen time and lower crime rates is correlative, not causative. But a recent study offers compelling new data from a surprising source: televised sports. The paper, “Entertainment as Crime Prevention: Evidence from Chicago Sports Games,” which was published in the Journal of Sports Economics, in May, by two social-science researchers at the University of California at Davis, found that crime rates in Chicago fell by as much as twenty-five per cent during major televised sports events, such as Bears or White Sox games and the Super Bowl.

Their data set was rich, spanning the period from January of 2001 through December of 2013, a stretch in which they analyzed twelve Super Bowls, two hundred and four Bears games (a hundred and eighty-six on Sundays, eighteen on Monday nights), ninety-four N.B.A. Finals games, sixty-eight Bulls playoff games, seventy World Series games, and thirty-four Cubs and White Sox playoff games. The authors, Hannah Laqueur and Ryan Copus, examined Chicago crime reports by the half hour while those games were in progress and compared them to reports from the same time, day, and month when the teams weren’t playing.

The effects were hard to miss. On Monday nights when the Bears were playing, crime in Chicago was down thirteen per cent—property crimes by three per cent, violent crimes by eleven per cent, and drug crimes by nearly thirty per cent—compared to the same Monday-night time slot when the Bears were off. Crime was consistently lower, though to a smaller degree, during N.B.A. finals games, Bulls playoff games, and Cubs and White Sox playoff games, regardless of whether the games were played at home or away. The Super Bowl had the biggest impact. During the three-plus hours of the game, crime fell by an average of twenty-five per cent—property and violent crimes by roughly fifteen per cent and drug crimes by more than sixty per cent—which amounts to about sixty fewer crimes.

Sports-watching does come with violence. In the case of the Super Bowl, the drop in violent crime during the game was cancelled out by a spike in crime immediately afterward, probably due to people gathering and drinking, the authors suggest. Other studies have found that domestic violence is more common on days that N.F.L. games are played, especially when the home team loses in an upset; the same is true in England when the national soccer team plays. Assaults, vandalism, and charges of disorderly conduct are more frequent on days when the local college or N.F.L. team is playing at home. But in a large city such as Chicago, where the TV audience is far bigger than the live one, the over-all drop in crime rate more than offsets those small increases.

This results hint at a different way to think about crime, Laqueur told me. With the exception of the Super Bowl, crime rates in the hours before and after the sports-watching dip were merely typical; they didn’t bump upward. This suggests that crimes not committed during a game aren’t moved to a different time slot; they’re cancelled. That aligns with some studies of hot-spot policing: when police focus their energies on high-crime areas, the crimes they prevent there aren’t carried out elsewhere later. A crime forestalled is a crime not committed, period.

Traditionally, scholars and law-enforcement officials have looked to psychology, biology, sociology, and economics for the “root” causes of criminality. But Laqueur and Copus’s study “suggests that some part of crime is opportunistic and situational,” she said. “Contingencies can make a difference,” Laqueur said. “It’s like any other set of human choices.” In a sense, crime—some of it, anyway—is a kind of recreation, and it can be addressed as a time-management problem. The would-be criminal is as distractible as anyone else. To prevent his would-be crime, give him something better to do.

In the meanwhile, maybe we should let him watch sports. Sports seasons could be shifted so that high-viewership events such as the N.B.A. playoffs occur in the summer, when crime rates are highest. Make the more interminable sports last even longer: more innings in baseball, more timeouts in basketball and football. (This might spur some minor aggression—remote controls thrown, voices raised—but could be worth the trade-off.) “Maybe we should be promoting longer sports, like golf,” Laqueur joked. “Maybe if we had some promotion of cricket that would make a difference!” Maybe. Until then, the World Cup is underway, with dozens of hours left to watch.