by Last June, 10 people were shot during celebrations the night the Denver Nuggets won the National Basketball Association title. In 2019, four people were shot at the Toronto Raptors’ NBA championship rally. Two men were shot to death in a Los Angeles suburb during the celebration of the Dodgers’ 2020 World Series victory.
This week saw the latest example of violence marring a celebratory sporting moment. On Wednesday, gunshots were heard at the end of a Super Bowl victory parade in Kansas City, Missouri, leaving one woman dead and at least 22 people injured. The bloodshed led Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas to question whether the city would have another parade if the team won again.
“If we are lucky enough to win a Super Bowl again, will we do this again?” Mr. Lucas asked during a interview with KMBC, a local news station. “Or do we just say, ‘Go to Arrowhead Stadium, go through the metal detectors,’ and have a much smaller, very safe event?”
The vast majority of sporting events and championship celebrations take place without any overt violence. But some high-profile cases in recent years have sparked growing concern among some that sporting events are becoming less safe. Although little data is available on the exact number of violent incidents each year in and around sporting events, researchers say several factors contribute to this sentiment.
One is the large number of people involved. A typical NFL game, for example, attracts about 70,000 spectators. Larger crowds naturally increase the number of interactions that can lead to violence, said Tamara Herold, a criminal justice professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies crowd control and violence at sporting events.
“Crowd density tends to matter quite a bit,” Dr. Herold said.
The NFL has a security presence at its official events such as games, including the Super Bowl and Pro Bowl, and the annual draft, with a “control center” that monitors the venue and even online conversations to react quickly to disturbances. Those events also take place in locations with security checkpoints that monitor the presence of firearms.
But parades and other championship celebrations are not official league events. The parade in Kansas City, for example, passed through the heart of the city and attendees did not have to go through any security checkpoints.
The availability of alcohol, extreme heat or cold, and even the importance of the game in question (for example, Game 7 of the World Series) can also be aggravating factors in violence, Dr. Herold said.
Stephen Billings, a professor at the University of Colorado business school who studies crime, said the assumption of more aggressive behavior at sporting events — where people often drink alcohol and shout — could also contribute. to those outbursts.
“When the norms are different from the typical norms of society and people feel that they have the right to do something, that’s when we also have conflict,” he said.
And the effects can extend beyond the venues. Dr. Billings’ research found that violent crime increased within a half-mile of venues in Charlotte, North Carolina, between 2005 and 2009 on game days compared to non-game days.
Over a four-year period, National Hockey League regular-season games were associated with a roughly 10 percent increase in assaults in host cities, according to research by Kristina Block, a doctoral student at the Sam Houston State University. More research by Ms. Block, written with Jacob Kaplan, a researcher at Princeton University, found a 7 percent increase in local disorderly conduct crimes during home playoff games in the NHL.
Steven Block, a professor of criminology at Central Connecticut State University, examined approximately 60 incidents of fights between fans in North American stadiums in a document 2017. Fights often arose from rival team allegiances, involved alcohol, and were broken up by other spectators, not stadium security.
Dr. Block also emphasized the role of density.
“Just by the numbers, people can feel like there’s no security,” he said. “They feel they are alone, both to act aggressively and to defend themselves.”
After the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, cities stepped up surveillance and began sharing more information about how to prevent another attack. But those efforts focused on threats of terrorism, not the kind of violence that erupts spontaneously.
However, Dr. Herold emphasized that the vast majority of sporting events were safe and that the violence Americans heard about was the exception.
“These things, when they happen, are tragedies,” he said. “But they are still relatively rare events.”
