What is the short-run impact of media violence on crime? Laboratory experiments in psychology find that exposure to media violence increases aggression. In this paper, we provide field evidence on this question. We exploit variation in violence of blockbuster movies between 1995 and 2002, and study the effect on same-day assaults. We find that violent crime decreases on days with higher theater...

The hypothesized relation between uncomfortably hot temperatures and aggressive behavior was examined in two studies of violent and nonviolent crime. Data on rates of murder, rape, assault, robbery, burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft were gathered from archival sources. The first three crimes listed are violent; the latter four are less violent (labeled nonviolent). On the basis o...

For two decades crime rates, particularly for violent crimes, have been declining across the globe. Homicide rates, the best-measured violent crime, are down by 50% or more in many Western European countries and in the US. The crime drop is not limited to wealthy western countries. Over the past 20 years the homicide rate in large numbers of developing countries has declined by two-thirds or more.

BACKGROUND Opioid maintenance treatment (OMT) is regarded as a crime control measure. Yet, some individuals are charged with violent criminal offenses while enrolled in OMT. This article aims to generate nuanced knowledge about violent crime among a group of imprisoned, OMT-enrolled individuals by exploring their understandings of the role of substances in violent crime prior to and during OMT,...

Research has identified a multitude of demographic, psychological, and contextual factors that are associated with violent offending among youth. However, much of the previous research has focused on single factors, and little is known about the effects of these various factors in tandem. The present study examines whether certain community factors impact the effects of race and psychopathology...

Tobacco shops, medical marijuana dispensaries (MMD), and off-sale alcohol outlets are legal and prevalent in South Los Angeles, California-a high-crime, low-income urban community of color. This research is the first to explore the geographic associations between these three legal drug outlets with surrounding crime and violence in a large low-income urban community of color. First, spatial buf...

AIMS To examine the relationship between alcohol outlet density and violent crime controlling for neighbourhood sociostructural characteristics and the effects of spatially autocorrelated error. DESIGN The sample for this ecologic study comprised 188 census tracts from the City of Austin, Texas and 263 tracts from the City of San Antonio, Texas. Data pertaining to neighbourhood social structu...

OBJECTIVES Violence is a major urban public health problem in the United States. The impact of a physical barrier placed across a street in a public housing project to prevent street violence and drug activity was evaluated. METHODS Hartford Police Department data on violent and drug related crime incidence within the housing project containing the barrier were analyzed by use of a computeriz...

Previous research has indicated that playing violent video games may be associated with an increase in acceptance of violence and positive attitudes towards perpetrators of crime. This study is the first to investigate the relationship between playing violent video games and attitudes towards victims of crime. A total of 206 young people (aged 12-24 years) completed measures of attitudes toward...

In the 1990s, while there was a large decline in property-related crime along the U.S.Mexico border, violent crime rates began to converge to the national average. At the same time, legal and illegal immigration from Mexico surged and border enforcement rose to unprecedented levels. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between border county crime rates, immigration and enforcement sin...