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158 Criminal Justice Policy Review Den opened on a service road within 750 ft of the I-70 off-ramp. A large, elevated sign let I-70 travelers know that x-rated videos, books, and novelties could be pur- chased "24/7." The store was successful by all accounts. The residents of Montrose did not welcome the new business. Unlike the village's other businesses, the Lion's Den was located on the residential side of I-70. Complaining that the store disrupted their idyllic lifestyle, villagers picketed the site on several occasions.Traffic was a chronic complaint.The narrow gravel access road connecting the site to I-70 could not support the weight of big-rig trucks; it soon fell into disrepair.The Lion's Den offered to build a new, larger access road from I-70 to its site. But fearing an even larger volume of traffic, the villagers declined the offer. Like all Illinois villages, Montrose had no adult business ordinances. However, the Lion's Den was located within 1,000 feet of a public park, in violation of an Illinois statute. When the State moved to enforce its statute, the Lion's Den sued, arguing that "off-site" adult businesses could not generate the public safety hazards associated with adult cabarets, video arcades, and other on-site adult entertainment businesses. The trial in State v. The Lion's Den et al. lasted 4 days. The court upheld the statute and, in July, 2005, the Montrose Lion's Den closed its doors. At the trial, the State presented evidence of the Lion's Den's adverse impact on the surrounding area: sexually explicit litter and decreased use of the nearby park. However neither party presented local crime data.Table 1 reports data bearing on the crime-related secondary effects of the adult business in Montrose.During the 1,642-day period beginning January 1, 2002, the Effingham County Sheriff's Office recorded 83 crime incidents in the village. The most common incidents involved the theft or destruction of property.Incidents of disorder and indecency,traffic-related incidents, and alcohol-drug offenses were nearly as common. Incidents involving danger or harm to persons (robbery, assault, etc.) were rare. The columns labeled "Open" and "Closed" in Table 1 break the incidents down into an 881-day segment in which the Lion's Den was open and a 761-day segment in which it was closed. Crime rates are 22.39 and 13.92 total incidents per year for the "Open" and "Closed" segments, respectively. From these raw rates, it appears that crime in Montrose rose when the Lion's Den opened and fell when the Lion's Den closed. Of course, this assumes that plausible alternative hypotheses for the difference can be ruled out. Null Hypothesis The most obvious alternative explanation is that the difference is because of chance. To rule this out, the daily total crime count series was regressed on a binary variable representing "Open" and "Closed" days (Cameron & Trivedi, 1998). The log-parameter values reported in Table I were estimated with Stata 9.2 (Stata Corporation, 2007). Because the effect estimate 13 = 0.475 occurs with probability p(t?2.09) <0.035, by the conventional 95% confidence criterion, the chance expla- nation, or null hypothesis, is rejected. Downloaded from http:/uJpsagepuY arl�YrtrLIFORNIA IRVINE on May 25,2008 ®2008 SAGE Publications.All rights rase mmercial use or unauthorized distribution.