Abstract
After a large-scale natural disaster, affected areas are prone to suffering the three factors in routine activity theory (Cohen and Felson, American Sociological Review 44:588–608, 1979) that encourage the occurrence of crime: the existence of likely offenders and of suitable targets and the absence of capable guardians. Thus, crime may be considered more likely to occur the greater the scale of disaster damage and the longer the delay in disaster recovery. In order to clarify the relationship between disaster damage and crime, this study conducted an online survey of participants (n = 2800) sampled from residents of prefectures which suffered significant damage in the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011—namely, Iwate, Miyagi, Fukushima, and Ibaraki—and asked about the scale of damage caused by the earthquake (e.g., whether or not there were victims or evacuations), delays in recovery from the disaster (i.e., number of blackout days), and whether or not crimes occurred after the quake (namely, bicycle and motorbike theft, automobile theft, gasoline theft, house burglary, violence and injuries, opportunistic swindling). We conducted logistic regression analysis using the occurrence of crimes as dependent variables and earthquake damage and other factors as independent variables; significant independent variables were confirmed for all models except that which took automobile theft as a dependent variable, and from the results we found that bicycle and motorbike theft, gasoline theft, house burglary, violence and injuries, and opportunistic swindling were more likely to occur the greater the earthquake damage and that in particular the likelihood of bicycle and motorbike theft occurring is influenced by any delay in recovery from earthquake damage. In order to prevent crime occurring in the wake of large-scale natural disasters, we should therefore seek to speed up disaster recovery, by however small a degree.
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Acknowledgment
This research was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 25285025.
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Okamoto, H., Mori, T., Abe, T., Saito, T. (2018). The Effect of Disaster Damage on the Occurrence of Crime: A Survey of Residents of Four Prefectures Affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake. In: Liu, J., Miyazawa, S. (eds) Crime and Justice in Contemporary Japan. Springer Series on Asian Criminology and Criminal Justice Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69359-0_5
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