CLEVELAND, OHIO

August 24, 1977

This police department report is taken from information given by Captain Delau participating in a panel discussion at the National Conference on the Blight of Obscenity held in Cleveland July 28-29, 1977. The topic was "The Impact of Obscenity on the Total Community." Crime statistics are included for 1976 robberies and rapes. Areas evaluated were census tracts (204 in the whole city, 15 study tracts with sexually oriented businesses). At the time of the study, Cleveland had 26 pornography outlets (eight movie houses and 18 bookstores with "peep show" booths). Their location was not regulated by city zoning laws.

For 1976, study tracts had nearly double the number of robberies as the city as a whole (40.5 per study tract compared to 20.5 for other city tracts). In one study tract with five sexually oriented businesses and 730 people, there were 136 robberies. In the city's largest tract (13,587 people, zero pornography outlets) there were only 14 robberies. Of the three tracts with the highest incidence of rape, two had sexually oriented businesses and the third bordered a tract with two such businesses. In these three, there were 41 rapes in 1976 (14 per tract), nearly seven times the city average of 2.4 rapes per census tract.

The report concluded that "close scrutiny of the figures from the Data Processing Unit on any and every phase of the degree of crime as recorded by census tracts indicates a much higher crime rate where the pornography outlets are located."