Addicts or opportunists? a study of casino-related crime in Elgin, Illinois

We test for linkages between patterns of property crime and patterns of gambling activity in the area surrounding the Grand Victoria Casino in Elgin, Illinois. The primary objective of this study is to examine spatial and temporal crime patterns to establish the motivations behind casino-related crime.  Using address level  data obtained from the Elgin police department, we test two competing theories of crime, the Rational Choice Theory and the Routine Activities Theory, to identify whether any increases in crime surrounding the casino are due to increased gambling losses or increased casino traffic.  Understanding the underlying causes of crime can help resolve some of the disagreement in the existing literature about how best to measure crime rates.  It can also help policymakers design more appropriately targeted interventions.  If crime is related to pathological gambling, the trigger should be increased gambling losses, but if crime is related to increased traffic, the trigger should be higher admission counts.  Granger causality tests provide some evidence that increased traffic is associated with higher crime, but increased gambling losses are not.  In addition, we examine whether the spatial pattern of crime shows increases in census tracts that are likely to see higher casino traffic.  We find that increased casino admissions do Granger cause crime in some areas surrounding the casino, but not in the immediate vicinity.  Principal components analysis also suggests that patterns of crime are concentrated in a ring of nearby census tracts just outside the census tract that contains the casino.  Collectively, the findings in this paper suggest that policy would be better directed at crime prevention and enforcement rather than the prevention or treatment of pathological gambling.