Climate Change, Disaster, and Crime

Climate change, disaster, and crime intersect in the growing body of criminological research examining how extreme weather events and their aftermath generate distinctive patterns of offending, victimization, and criminal justice response, a domain increasingly termed disaster criminology. As climate change increases the frequency and severity of hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and other extreme weather events, understanding how communities and criminal justice institutions respond to the crime patterns these disasters generate has become an increasingly significant concern within green criminology. This domain is distinct from the broader criminological study of climate change as a driver of atmospheric harm, focusing instead specifically on crime occurring in disaster contexts and on how disaster conditions reshape ordinary patterns of offending and victimization. The discussion that follows examines the persistent looting myth in disaster criminology, patterns of post-disaster fraud and exploitation, long-term crime pattern shifts associated with climate-driven disasters, and the theoretical accounts explaining disaster-related crime.

Introduction

Disaster criminology emerged as a distinct research area substantially through the work of sociologists studying community behavior following major disasters, well before climate change specifically became a central organizing concern within the field. Kelly Frailing and Dee Wood Harper’s development of a criminology of disaster argues that disasters create distinctive social conditions, including disrupted normal social control mechanisms and concentrated opportunity structures, that generate crime patterns meaningfully different from those observed under ordinary community conditions (Frailing & Harper, 2017). This foundational framework has informed subsequent research examining how climate change’s increasing disaster frequency may expand the scope and significance of disaster-specific crime patterns going forward.

Enrico Quarantelli’s classic disaster sociology research, predating contemporary climate change concerns by several decades, established an empirical foundation for disaster criminology by documenting that the widely assumed prevalence of looting and social breakdown following disasters is substantially exaggerated relative to actual observed behavior, a finding that has shaped how subsequent researchers approach popular narratives about post-disaster lawlessness (Quarantelli, 1994). This foundational skepticism toward assumed disaster lawlessness continues to inform contemporary disaster criminology’s more nuanced empirical approach to understanding which crime types actually increase following disaster events.

Disaster Criminology and the Looting Myth

Popular media coverage of major disasters has historically emphasized looting and social breakdown, a narrative pattern that disaster sociology research has consistently found to overstate the actual prevalence of such behavior relative to the much more common patterns of community cooperation and mutual aid observed in most post-disaster contexts. Enrico Quarantelli’s foundational research on this pattern, developed across multiple disaster case studies over several decades, found that reported looting incidents frequently involve a comparatively small number of opportunistic offenders rather than the widespread social breakdown that media narratives often suggest occurred (Quarantelli, 1994).

Lori Barsky, Joseph Trainor, and Manuel Torres’s detailed study of crime patterns following Hurricane Katrina specifically revisited the looting myth question in the context of that disaster’s extensive media coverage, finding that while property crime did increase in some affected areas, the pattern was considerably more localized and less severe than contemporaneous media coverage suggested, consistent with the broader disaster sociology literature’s skepticism toward disaster lawlessness narratives (Barsky, Trainor, & Torres, 2006). This finding proved influential in subsequent disaster criminology research examining how media narratives about disaster crime may themselves shape public and institutional response to actual disaster events.

Michael Leitner’s geographic analysis of crime distribution following Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans found that crime patterns shifted substantially in both location and type following the disaster, with some crime categories declining in devastated areas experiencing population displacement while others increased in areas receiving displaced populations, complicating any simple narrative of uniform crime increase or decrease following a major disaster event (Leitner & Helbich, 2011).

Charles Fritz and J.H. Mathewson’s classic mid-century study of convergence behavior in disasters, an early foundational text in disaster sociology predating most contemporary disaster criminology scholarship, similarly documented that spontaneous prosocial convergence toward disaster sites, whether by volunteers, donated goods, or concerned family members, substantially exceeded the antisocial convergence associated with looting, establishing an empirical pattern that subsequent disaster criminology research including the looting myth studies examined above has consistently reproduced across multiple subsequent disaster events (Fritz & Mathewson, 1957).

Post-Disaster Fraud, Corruption, and Exploitation

Disaster fraud, encompassing false insurance claims, fraudulent charitable solicitation, and misrepresentation in disaster relief applications, represents a documented category of post-disaster offending distinct from the property crime that dominates popular looting narratives, involving offenders who may never have been physically present in the affected disaster area at all. Kelly Frailing and Dee Wood Harper’s disaster criminology framework identifies this fraud category as often exceeding conventional property crime in total financial harm following major disasters, since fraud schemes can operate at scale across entire disaster-affected regions rather than being limited to the opportunistic and geographically concentrated offending typically associated with looting (Frailing & Harper, 2017).

Price gouging, involving substantial price increases for essential goods and services in the immediate aftermath of a disaster when normal supply chains are disrupted, occupies a distinctive position within disaster-related offending because many jurisdictions have enacted specific statutory prohibitions against the practice during declared emergencies, creating a category of offense that exists only in disaster contexts rather than representing disaster-specific manifestation of an offense that also occurs under ordinary conditions. Enforcement of these price gouging statutes has generated its own body of legal and criminological attention regarding how to balance emergency price controls against concerns that price signals also serve a legitimate function in directing scarce goods toward areas of greatest need during a crisis.

Corruption in disaster relief and reconstruction contracting has been documented across multiple major disaster events, involving both fraudulent contractor billing for work not actually performed and corrupt influence over the contract award process itself, harm that disaster criminology scholars have argued deserves comparable attention to more visible forms of disaster-related crime given its substantial financial scale and its direct impact on the effectiveness of disaster recovery efforts for affected communities.

Climate-Driven Disasters and Long-Term Crime Pattern Shifts

Robert Agnew’s theoretical model connecting climate change to crime, extending general strain theory to climate-driven social disruption, predicts that the increasing frequency of climate-related disasters may generate elevated conventional crime rates in affected regions through mechanisms including displacement-driven strain, disrupted social control institutions, and resource scarcity competition, effects that would compound the acute disaster-period crime patterns examined earlier in this discussion with more diffuse longer-term consequences (Agnew, 2012).

Population displacement following major climate-related disasters has generated growing criminological attention to how displaced populations experience both elevated victimization risk in unfamiliar receiving communities and, in some documented cases, elevated involvement in offending associated with the economic and social disruption displacement produces. Michael Leitner’s research on post-Katrina crime geography found that these displacement effects generated measurable and persistent changes to crime distribution patterns extending well beyond the immediate disaster response period, suggesting that climate-driven disaster displacement may generate crime pattern consequences lasting years rather than only the acute post-disaster period typically emphasized in popular disaster narratives (Leitner & Helbich, 2011).

Repeated exposure to climate-related disasters in vulnerable regions raises distinctive criminological questions regarding cumulative community resilience and social control capacity, since communities experiencing recurrent disaster events may face compounding strain on the social and institutional resources that disaster criminology research has identified as protective against elevated post-disaster crime, a concern of increasing relevance as climate change increases disaster frequency in many already vulnerable regions.

Theoretical Explanations for Disaster-Related Crime

General strain theory, extended to disaster contexts through Robert Agnew’s climate change scholarship, explains disaster-related crime through the acute and chronic strains disasters generate, including property loss, displacement, and disrupted social relationships, strains the theory predicts will generate elevated offending particularly among populations lacking adequate coping resources to manage disaster-related stress through legitimate channels (Agnew, 2012).

Routine activities theory offers a complementary explanation focused specifically on the opportunity structures disasters create, since evacuated or damaged properties present concentrated opportunities for property crime absent the routine guardianship that ordinarily deters such offending, a framework that helps explain the acute, geographically concentrated property crime patterns documented in the looting myth research examined earlier in this discussion even as it does not fully account for the broader social cooperation patterns that same research found to be more prevalent than popular narratives suggest.

Kelly Frailing and Dee Wood Harper’s disaster criminology framework integrates these theoretical strands while emphasizing that disaster-related crime cannot be adequately explained through any single conventional criminological theory alone, since disasters generate simultaneously both the strain conditions associated with general strain theory and the opportunity structures associated with routine activities theory, while also disrupting the social control mechanisms that social disorganization theory identifies as ordinarily constraining crime (Frailing & Harper, 2017).

Conclusion

Climate change, disaster, and crime together constitute a distinctive and growing research domain within criminology, complicating popular narratives of widespread post-disaster lawlessness while documenting genuine, if more localized and varied, crime pattern changes following major disaster events. The persistent gap between media portrayal of disaster lawlessness and the more nuanced empirical picture disaster sociology and criminology research has documented underscores the continued value of rigorous empirical research in this domain rather than reliance on popular assumption.

As climate change increases the frequency and severity of major disasters, understanding both the acute post-disaster crime patterns examined here and the longer-term displacement-driven consequences documented in post-Katrina research becomes increasingly significant for criminal justice planning and disaster response policy. Continued development of disaster criminology as a distinct research program, building on the foundational work examined throughout this discussion, remains essential given climate change’s likely continued expansion of disaster frequency in the coming decades.

References and Further Reading

Agnew, R. (2012). Dire forecast: A theoretical model of the impact of climate change on crime. Theoretical Criminology, 16(1), 21–42.
Barsky, L. E., Trainor, J. E., & Torres, M. R. (2006). Disaster realities in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: Revisiting the looting myth. Natural Hazards Center Quick Response Report.
Brisman, A. (2008). Crime-environment relationships and environmental justice. Seattle Journal for Social Justice, 6(2), 727–817.
Brisman, A., & South, N. (2014). Green cultural criminology: Constructions of environmental harm, consumerism, and resistance to ecocide. Routledge.
Faber, D. (1998). The struggle for ecological democracy: Environmental justice movements in the United States. Guilford Press.
Frailing, K., & Harper, D. W. (2017). Fundamentals of criminology: New dimensions. Carolina Academic Press.
Fritz, C. E., & Mathewson, J. H. (1957). Convergence behavior in disasters: A problem in social control. National Academy of Sciences–National Research Council.
Kramer, R. C. (2013). Carbon in the atmosphere and power in America: Climate change as state-corporate crime. Journal of Crime and Justice, 36(2), 153–170.
Leitner, M., & Helbich, M. (2011). The impact of Hurricane Katrina on the geographic distribution of crime in New Orleans. Cartography and Geographic Information Science, 38(2), 181–196.
Lynch, M. J., Long, M. A., Stretesky, P. B., & Barrett, K. L. (2017). Green criminology: Crime, justice, and the environment. University of California Press.
Lynch, M. J., Stretesky, P. B., & Long, M. A. (2015). Defining crime: A critique of the concept and its alternatives. Palgrave Macmillan.
Pellow, D. N. (2007). Resisting global toxics: Transnational movements for environmental justice. MIT Press.
Quarantelli, E. L. (1994). Looting and antisocial behavior in disasters. Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware.
Ruggiero, V. (2013). The crimes of the economy: A criminological analysis of economic thought. Routledge.
Skinnider, E. (2011). Victims of environmental crime: Mapping the issues. International Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy.
South, N. (1998). A green field for criminology? A proposal for a perspective. Theoretical Criminology, 2(2), 211–233.
Stretesky, P. B., Long, M. A., & Lynch, M. J. (2013). The treadmill of crime: Political economy and green criminology. Routledge.
Taylor, D. E. (2014). Toxic communities: Environmental racism, industrial pollution, and residential mobility. New York University Press.
White, R. (2011). Transnational environmental crime: Toward an eco-global criminology. Routledge.
White, R. (2018). Climate change criminology. Bristol University Press.