I was intrigued by this article, though. It's an interesting idea, that violent movies could reduce crime, but there's an inherent flaw: how do you prove it? I haven't read their study, but I can guess that there are a lot of potential biases. Do you control for policing or sentencing changes, which would require using data from a regional or even local scale? Then you would need to include the presence of movie theaters, the dates violent films are shown, some sort of temporal analysis relating crime to the release of a movie. If so, your power is going to rapidly decrease (the more possible biases your study considers, the lower your degrees of freedom, the harder it is to notice anything). If not, well, any or all of those things could be biasing your results. The article hints at a possible temporal relationship:
Crime is not merely delayed until after the credits run, they say. On the Monday and Tuesday after packed weekend showings of violent films, no spike in violent crime emerges to compensate for the peaceful hours at the movies. Even a few weeks later, there is no evidence of a compensating resurgence, they say.
What did they use to measure this? Survival analysis? Whatever they did, to really get these results, would be pretty tricky stats, which the article doesn't mention.
Still, interesting thought.
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