MANCHESTER , Connecticut- – Does pornography cause crime?

Opponents of a new sexually oriented store in town told the Board of Directors in February that the business would bring more sexually related crime, attract dangerous people, and hurt local children.

Having Very Intimate Pleasures, or VIP, open in the former Huffman-Koos store at the Tolland Turnpike exit from Interstate 84 also would cause an image problem for the “city of village charm,” speakers said.

But experts in the field say there’s no proof that a store that sells pornography will cause additional crime.

Lori Sudderth, an associate professor at Quinnipiac University with a doctorate in sociology, says there’s no evidence that pornography causes “sexually aggressive behavior.”

“We can link it to attitude; we can’t link it to sexually-related behavior,” she says.

Clinton Sanders, a University of Connecticut professor and an expert in deviant behavior, strongly agrees.”There’s absolutely no causal relationship,” he says. “All those arguments are a smokescreen for the main concern: That these are dirty things and we don’t want dirty people coming here.”

Sudderth adds that the possibility that a sexually oriented business would bring more dangerous people into town is low, especially because, thanks to the Internet, such stores are no longer the only places to acquire porn.

And VIP would not be the first such store in town.

Amazing Superstore at 249 Broad St. opened in 1998 and sells pornographic movies and magazines, lingerie, body oils, and sex toys. When it opened, similar, if less strident, calls were made to keep the business away from parks and schools, but no significant changes were made in town zoning rules.

The store has not caused major criminal problems and generated fewer police calls than a comparable nearby store.

“There was no spike in crime from the opening of that business,” police Capt. Marc Montminy says of Amazing Superstore. “Certainly, facilities like pool halls and bars require more police service than a book store, but drawing a correlation between an adult store and crime in the area is pretty thin.”

According to Montminy, there have been 32 police calls to Amazing Superstore since 2003. Of those calls, there were nine false alarms, five suspicious activity calls, four parking lot accidents, three harassing phone calls, three traffic stops, one theft, one intoxicated person, and one indecent exposure call.

Other than the indecent exposure, Montminy said, the type and amount of police calls were nothing out of the ordinary.

Comparatively, Hollywood Video at 425 Broad St., a nearby and similarly sized business, had 61 police calls since 2003. Most notably, there were nine false alarms, five thefts, four motor-vehicle accidents, three disturbances, one drug investigation, one intoxicated driver call, and one burglary of a motor vehicle.

The Sherwin-Williams paint store that shares a parking lot with Amazing Superstore had only three police calls in the past three years, and none of them were major incidents.

Montminy says that there have been no significant local trends in sexual crimes since 2003, with between 76 and 106 incidents a year.

He adds that extra policing of an adult-oriented business would occur only “if there were statistical proof to indicate that this was damaging to the crime pattern, and I have yet to see any information to prove that.”

Montminy says that, generally, crime increases with the number of people, which is why the Buckland Hills mall and large residential areas require more policing. Specific types of stores don’t have the same effect, he says.

If a store caused serious crime, Montminy says, the police department would “do everything to shut it down.”

Les Rich, chief financial officer for Capital Video Corp., Amazing Superstore’s parent company, says: “We have over 40 stores and it’s never been an issue at any of our stores.To some extent, it’s like saying that a liquor store would create a bad environment. Our business is legal; we control it to adults.

“Typically, it comes up as an argument, not from a factual basis, but from folks who don’t want to see this type of business come into their community,” he says.

Sudderth says sexually aggressive behavior can be caused by a variety of factors, but pornography is not one of them.”The pornography itself doesn’t cause the behavior; the tendency for that behavior is already there,” she says.

Large-scale federal studies back up this stance. After two years of research, the President’s Commission on Obscenity concluded in 1970 that there was no evidence that exposure to erotic materials caused sex crimes.

Those findings were reached again in 1985 by the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, known as the Meese Commission.

Sudderth adds that the Meese Commission did find that violent pornography could desensitize people, but she argues that the same could be said about violent movies. VIP and Amazing Superstore don’t sell porn that is violent or simulates rape, according to their representatives.

“I wouldn’t be concerned about this store coming in,” Sudderth says. “If you’re focusing on pornography or focusing on this one establishment as the cause of sexual assault, you’re chasing the wrong thing.”