Suchergebnisse

Recent federal court decisions appear to limit the ability of cities to mitigate the ambient crime risks associated with adult entertainment businesses. In one instance, a court has assumed that criminological theories do not apply to "off‐site" adult businesses. After developing the legal doctrine of secondary effects, we demonstrate that the prevailing criminological theory applies to all adult business models. To corroborate the theory, we report the results of a before/after quasi‐experiment for an off‐site adult business. When an off‐site adult business opens, ambient crime risk doubles compared to a control area. As theory predicts, moreover, ambient victimization risk is most acute in night‐time hours. The theoretical development and empirical results have obvious implications for the evolving legal doctrine of secondary effects.

AbstractA model is developed for assessing the temporary and permanent impact of the Family Law Act, and the application and construct validity of the model are examined.

Deutsch and Alt (1977) use a time series quasi-experiment to assess the impact of the Massachusetts gun control law on gun-related crime in Boston. They conclude that the new law resulted in a statistically significant drop in both armed robberies and gun assaults, though not in homocides. However, our reanalysis of their data suggests that these conclusions are extremely tenuous. First, Deutsch and Alt have seriously mis specified the stochastic components for the three time series. We report alternative models which, in all three cases, have better statistical properties. Second, Deutsch and Alt conduct their analysis only six months after passage of the new law. This postintervention time series segment is obviously too short a period to permit specification of the inter vention component. Our reanalysis demonstrates that there is inconclusive evidence for the effect claimed by Deutsch and Alt.