Forecasting Crime During Disaster: The 1977 New York City Blackout and Hurricane Katrina

Veteran disaster researchers argue that a “therapeutic community” emerges after disaster and that prosocial behavior overrides criminal or antisocial behavior. However, there are examples of crime occurring during disaster, and contemporary disaster researchers are challenging the claim that crime does not happen. Some scholars make the case that enough antisocial behavior occurs during disaster to warrant the development of a criminology of disaster. Using secondary data analysis, this paper compares pre-event social structural similarities between two disasters during which crime occurred, the 1977 New York City Blackout and Hurricane Katrina (2005), with the goal of furthering the development of a criminology of disaster. Although these are two different disasters that happened in very distinctive moments in time, New York City and New Orleans had commonalities with regard to indicators of social vulnerability and structural strain that are worthy of further interrogation and that could help anticipate where crimogenic behavior may emerge during disaster. While previous studies have examined the role of pre-existing structural strain, studies have not compared such disparate events, a blackout and a hurricane flood event, that are nearly 50 years apart. This analysis illuminates the significance of pre-existing conditions, thereby adding to the explanatory value of applying structural strain to disaster. Pre-disaster indicators like the unemployment rate, the social history of the impacted area, the type of event, the stability of law enforcement, and the pre-event crime picture arguably relate to whether crime happens during disaster. While this argument is not airtight, because some crimes are opportunistic, it adds to the explanatory value of applying criminological theories to disaster.