The Impact of Wildfire Smoke Exposure on Crime

Abstract Using crime data from 21 major U.S. cities spanning 2007–20, this paper studies the impacts of wildfire smoke on crimes. Wildfire smoke increases concentrations of multiple pollutants simultaneously, which makes it important to use wildfire smoke as a single, unified treatment variable. Our results show that wildfire smoke significantly increases crime, with particularly notable impacts on violent and drug-related crimes. Wildfire smoke leads to increases of 0.49% in overall crime, 0.88% in violent offenses, and 1.35% in drug-related crimes. Our findings show that crime rates surge on the first and second consecutive days of smoke exposure but diminish from the third day onward, possibly due to adaptive behaviors to limit smoke exposure. Lastly, the effects of air quality alerts vary across types of crimes: overall and violent crimes fall but drug-related crimes increase on smoky days with alert days compared to without alert.