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Estimates
of the share of crime attributable to casinos in
the same year for individual crimes ranged
between
5.5 and 30 percent. Auto theft was the highest,
followed by robbery at 23 percent. The values
for the rest of the offenses were between 5.5
and 10 percent.
B. Costs of Casino-Induced Crime
Another way to evaluate the crime impact is to
look at its implied cost. Recent studies have
estimated the social costs of index crimes, and
numbers are publicly available for the average
property loss for property crimes. Thus, we
report several alternatives here. First, we use
the
cost per victimization figures adjusted to 2003
dollars using the CPI-U to calculate the total
social cost of crimes committed in casino
counties that are attributable to the casino
presence
according to the coefficients in Table 4.40 We
also report the total social cost for casino
counties
on a per adult basis. Finally, although the
social cost of property crime is not synonymous
with
the value of the lost property, the latter is
nevertheless useful in describing the effect of
casinos.
The Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics41
contains data about the average property loss
for
four of the offenses in this paper—robbery,
larceny, burglary, and auto theft. For those
offenses
we took the 5th year lag coefficient estimates
for each crime and multiplied them by the
average
loss per crime adjusted to 2003 dollars using
the CPI-U. This produced property loss numbers
per 100,000 population which can be aggregated
to the entire adult population.
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