Open for Business: The Impact of Opening Hours on Street Segment Crime Levels

• In Event: Crime and Place: Understanding Crime Patterns

Abstract

Crime levels vary considerably from one street segment to the next. Although many different types of businesses have been shown to act as crime generators or attractors, most studies only focused on how they affect the spatial patterning of crime and entirely ignored temporal variation. However, why would a business attract crime when it is closed? We combine police crime data for the year 2009 from the city of The Hague, Netherlands, with data on all local businesses and their opening hours to assess how the opening hours of businesses affect cyclical crime rhythms. All crimes (N=49,013) are geocoded to the street segment level (N=14,375) and we analyze street segment crimes by 2-hour intervals by day of the week. We employ fixed effects models to rigorously test how opening hours affect street segment crime controlling for time-stable (un)measured heterogeneity.

Authors

• Wouter Steenbeek, NSCR

• Stijn Ruiter, Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement