Seasonality of crime in Croatia: A relationship with tourism

Abstract

Peace, safety, and security are the primary conditions for successful tourism development and security threats such as terrorism, crime or potential war confl icts can strongly aff ect tourism. Of these threats, crime is the most widespread. Certain types of crime are seasonal and some criminal off ences are more often committed at a particular time of the year, week or day. Th e aim of this paper is to determine whether there is a connection between the seasonality of crime and tourism in Croatia. In order to achieve this aim, the correlation analysis was applied on monthly data from 2007 to 2018, using Pearson product-moment correlation coeffi cient to measure the strength of the relationship between crime and tourism. Th e analysis covered reported criminal off ences that may be related to tourism. Th e conducted analysis found a statistically signifi cant correlation between the tourist arrivals and stays and almost all types of reported criminal off ences, and this correlation was stronger for property crimes and weaker for violent crimes. Th e obtained results can help law enforcement agencies to allocate police offi cers in specifi c periods of time and thus to provide adequate resources to respond to crime, such as additional police offi cers during the summer or other seasons.