Is adult entertainment (e.g. strip clubs) a substitute for sex crime? It's an unpalatable question for many people, but this 2020 working paper by Riccardo Ciacci (Universidad Pontificia Comillas) and Maria Sviatschi (Princeton University) suggests they may be. They take high-frequency (hourly) observations from the NYPD Stop, Question and Frisk dataset, which is based on records by police officers of every person they stop while on patrol. Most stops did not result in a crime being recorded, and there were some serious problems with who was being stopped. The stop-and-frisk approach wound down after a 2013 lawsuit resulted in it being declared unconstitutional (see here).
Ciacci and Sviatschi use the police data covering the period from 2004 to 2012 (limiting their main analysis to records of "sexual abuse, sexual misconduct and rape"). They link that data to the number of adult entertainment establishments (strip clubs, gentlemen's clubs and escort girl services) at the police precinct level (for 77 precincts across all five boroughs of New York City). They use business records (like the Yellow Pages) and state administrative records to identify the opening dates of each establishment. Then, using a fairly straightforward regression model, they find that:
...the presence of an adult entertainment establishment in a given precinct leads to a 13% reduction in sex crime in the precinct one week after the opening.
Much of the rest of the paper is given over to demonstrating the robustness of their main result, which survives various tests (including the use of lower-frequency reported crime data, rather than the Stop, Question and Frisk data), and exploring the mechanisms that might explain the result. Showing that the results hold when avoiding the problematic Stop, Question and Frisk data is important, although it is worth noting that the effect they find is roughly half the size (although still statistically significant), when using the Citywide Historical NYPD data instead.
In terms of the mechanisms though, Ciacci and Sviatschi identify three possible channels (police channel, potential victims channel, and potential criminals channel). As they explain:
First, it could be the case that adult entertainment establishments reinforce security in the precinct if more police officers are assigned to the area. In this case, a decline in sex crimes could reflect a general decline in crime due to the higher number of officers present in the area after an establishment opens (police channel)... Second, women may be avoiding precincts where adult entertainment businesses have opened and are moving to bordering precincts where there are no establishments. Thus, the decline in crime could be explained by a reduction in potential victims. It could also be the case that adult entertainment establishments are employing potential street sex workers who, in absence of opportunities for indoor prostitution, would work on the streets. If most sex crimes are committed against street sex workers, adult entertainment establishments might reduce sex crimes by merely providing protection to street workers (potential victims channel). Finally, potential offenders might prefer to use adult entertainment establishments services instead of committing sex crimes... To put it another way, they provide consensual sexual activities that could substitute forced sexual activities (potential criminals channel).
Ciacci and Sviatschi demonstrate that there is no statistically significant relationship between adult entertainment establishments and other types of crime (burglary, drug offences, arson, weapon offences, criminal mischief, murder, forgery, obscenity, graffiti, or trespass, each considered individually). That seems to rule out the police channel, since you would expect higher numbers of these other crimes to be recorded if more police officers were in the area. They then look at the impact on street prostitution stops and find:
...no statistically significant effect... This result suggests that there has not been a reallocation of street sex workers to adult entertainment businesses, and it rules out the possibility that the decline in crime is driven by a reduction of street sex workers who could be the main potential victims of sex crimes in the street...
That leaves the potential criminals channel, which they find support for by showing that the impact on reducing sex crime is larger in the evenings (6 p.m. to midnight), when adult entertainment establishments are open, and that there is no significant effect in the afternoon (midday to 6 p.m.) when they are not. I don't find those results to be particularly compelling, (mainly because there is no effect at night (from midnight to 6 a.m., when many establishments would still be open), but they are at least consistent with the potential criminals channel.
There were a couple of things that I found interesting in the paper. First, the number of adult entertainment establishments grew rapidly in New York City over that eight-year period, from 76 in 2004 to 280 in 2012. Ciacci and Sviatschi note that there was only one closure of an establishment in that time, which I found to be extraordinary. They don't provide any real explanation for why there had been such a rapid increase in establishments over that period, nor why the increase was heavily concentrated in Manhattan (which had 75% of the openings). I don't know if it threatens the validity of the results, but we really need to know in order to interpret them. Second, this bit gave me a slight chuckle:
The New York State Department of State classifies adult entertainment establishments as businesses that regularly feature movies, photographs, or live performances that emphasize ”specified anatomical areas” or ”specified sexual activities” and excludes minors by reason of age.
"Specified anatomical areas" may be a candidate for euphemism of the year.
Overall, Ciacci and Sviatschi conclude that:
...the results show that providing substitute services may have positive externalities not only for sex workers but also for all women in the areas where these businesses opened.
In other words, providing adult entertainment establishments offers a substitute that might reduce sex crimes in the neighbourhood.
[HT: Marginal Revolution]
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