Casino Cure Delusional

Casinos and Crime: The Luck Runs Out

When it comes to crime, legalized casino gambling seemed to be a surprisingly good bet: Local unemployment went down, tax revenue went up and crime didn't increase when a casino opened. Some researchers even found that crime declined immediately after casinos came to town.

Well, the casino cure for crime proved to be just as delusional as gamblers' luck, says University of Georgia economist David B. Mustard.

Mustard and Earl L. Grinols of Baylor University analyzed crime data collected from all 3,165 U.S. counties in the United States from 1977 to 1996 and looked at local crime rates before and after casinos opened.

They found that crime didn't budge when a casino began operating -- at least at first. Crime began to rise after the first year, slowly at first and then more quickly, until it had far surpassed what it would have been if the casino had never opened. By the fifth year of operation, robberies were up 136 percent; aggravated assaults, 91 percent; auto theft, 78 percent; burglary, 50 percent; larceny, 38 percent; and rape, 21 percent. Controlling for other factors, 8.6 percent of property crimes and 12.6 percent of violent crimes were attributed to casinos, he said.

But what about all those casino jobs and newly minted police? Mustard said the positive effects of casinos are fleeting -- payrolls and tax collections quickly plateau, and municipalities don't keep adding cops after the first wave of casino tax revenue rolls in.

What's more, Mustard said, crime rates didn't rise in neighboring counties while they soared in casino counties -- evidence that casinos create crime locally and don't merely attract it from somewhere else.

And here's sobering news for those in the District and Maryland who think casinos would jump-start the local economies: "Even using conservative estimates of costs and generous estimates of benefits, we still find the costs exceed the benefits," Mustard said.