HOUSTON, Feb. 16 (UPI) -- The influx of evacuees from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina had little impact on crime rates in the cities that took them in, researchers say.
Five criminologists who examined crime rates in the three cities found a spike in homicide and robbery in Houston immediately after Katrina and in homicide in Phoenix, the Houston Chronicle reports. But they found no significant increase in other crimes, and murder and robbery rates soon declined again.
Houston grew by 7 percent as almost 240,000 people from New Orleans evacuated there. About 30,000 came to San Antonio and 6,000 to Phoenix.
Sean Varano, a criminologist at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, said he and the other researchers wanted to check on anecdotal information on huge increases in crime.
"One of our takeaway messages is if the evacuees were responsible for this crime wave, we would have expected to see a much broader range of crime to increase besides murder and robbery," Varano said. "This is not quite the effect the local people claimed on the ground there."
The study was published in the Journal of Criminal Justice.
