Crime Rates in a Pandemic: the Largest Criminological Experiment in History (original) (raw)
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A global analysis of the impact of COVID-19 stay-at-home restrictions on crime
Nature Human Behaviour
The stay-at-home restrictions to control the spread of COVID-19 led to unparalleled sudden change in daily life, but it is unclear how they affected urban crime globally. We collected data on daily counts of crime in 27 cities across 23 countries in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. We conducted interrupted time series analyses to assess the impact of stay-at-home restrictions on different types of crime in each city. Our findings show that the stay-at-home policies were associated with a considerable drop in urban crime, but with substantial variation across cities and types of crime. Meta-regression results showed that more stringent restrictions over movement in public space were predictive of larger declines in crime.
Changes in Crime Rates During the COVID-19 Pandemic
2021
Research Summary: We estimate changes in the rates of five FBI Part 1 crimes—homicide, auto theft, burglary, robbery, and larceny—during the COVID-19 pandemic from March through December 2020. Using publicly available weekly crime count data from 29 of the 70 largest cities in the U.S. from January 2018 through December 2020, three different linear regression model specifications are used to detect changes. One detects whether crime trends in four 2020 preand post-pandemic periods differ from those in 2018 and 2019. A second looks in more detail at the spring 2020 lockdowns to detect whether crime trends changed over successive biweekly periods into the lockdown. The third uses a city-level openness index that we created for the purpose of examining whether the degree of openness was associated with changing crime rates. For homicide and auto theft, we find significant increases during all or most of the pandemic. By contrast, we find significant declines in robbery and larceny duri...
Crime and coronavirus: social distancing, lockdown, and the mobility elasticity of crime
Crime Science
Governments around the world restricted movement of people, using social distancing and lockdowns, to help stem the global coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. We examine crime effects for one UK police force area in comparison to 5-year averages. There is variation in the onset of change by crime type, some declining from the WHO 'global pandemic' announcement of 11 March, others later. By 1 week after the 23 March lockdown, all recorded crime had declined 41%, with variation: shoplifting (− 62%), theft (− 52%), domestic abuse (− 45%), theft from vehicle (− 43%), assault (− 36%), burglary dwelling (− 25%) and burglary non-dwelling (− 25%). We use Google Covid-19 Community Mobility Reports to calculate the mobility elasticity of crime for four crime types, finding shoplifting and other theft inelastic but responsive to reduced retail sector mobility (MEC = 0.84, 0.71 respectively), burglary dwelling elastic to increases in residential area mobility (− 1), with assault inelastic but responsive to reduced workplace mobility (0.56). We theorise that crime rate changes were primarily caused by those in mobility, suggesting a mobility theory of crime change in the pandemic. We identify implications for crime theory, policy and future research.
Pandemic Restrictions and Spatiotemporal Crime Patterns in New York, São Paulo, and Stockholm
Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 2021
Studies are showing evidence of the effect of changes in routine activities due to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic on crime levels in many cities worldwide. This study evaluates the potential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on temporal and spatial patterns of crime in three major cities under very different national contexts. Each of the three countries and cities experienced different levels of pandemic restrictions and societal closure. The cities of New York (the United States), São Paulo (Brazil), and Stockholm (Sweden) were selected as cases. Temporal quantitative methods, spatial statistics techniques, and Geographical Information System (GIS) underlie the methodology used in this study. Findings show that there is a statistically significant break in the trend in crime levels after the stay-at-home orders were implemented in New York City, São Paulo, and Stockholm in the first months of 2020; the only exception was for murder. Such an impact varies by crime type and city context, but increases again after a few months, indicating how fast crime and criminals adapt. Residential burglary decreased, whereas nonresidential burglary increased overall. Changes in the levels and geography of vehicle thefts were observed, with an overall increase of significant cold spots but, in several cases, also solidification of existing crime concentrations in known crime attractors and in some deprived areas.
Crimes in the Time of COVID-19
Vantage: Journal of Thematic Analysis
Due to the current pandemic, governments all over the world have given stay at home orders and have advised people to follow precautions like social distancing. These measures have a significant impact on our social, economic, and political setting which ultimately affects the volume and distribution of crimes worldwide. To understand the impact of social distancing policies on crime, we have compared the crime statistics during the pandemic (2020) with that of the previous year (2019) for the two metropolitan cities New Delhi, India, and New York, USA. We observe the trends of different types of crime and conclude that while crimes like residential burglaries have reduced, crimes like domestic violence have increased significantly. A rise in commercial burglaries 1 was observed in New York whereas in New Delhi a decline was observed because of the presence of the police on roads. Furthermore, A decline in crimes like robbery, burglary, larceny, etc. was observed whereas a sharp increase was seen in the cases of domestic violence in both the cities.
Crime in the Era of COVID-19: Evidence from England
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2021
The rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and the prescribed countermeasures of restrictions to mobility and social distancing are disrupting economic activity around the world. This applies to legal economic activity but also to criminal behavior and illegal activity. In this study, we investigate the effects of COVID-19-induced lockdowns on recorded crime in England. The enforcement of lockdowns in the country at both the national and local levels, temporally and spatially, allows unveiling the impact on criminal activities by type of shutdown policy. We use official crime data across the universe of local authorities dating back to May 2013 for all recorded crime categories. We find that (1) National lockdowns decrease all types of criminal behavior, except for antisocial behavior, drug offences and crimes against public order which are recording increases. (2) Relaxing national lockdown restrictions attenuates the initial crime effects of strict lockdowns across all crimes. (3) Local lockdowns affect fewer crime categories, limited to increasing antisocial behavior and weapons possession offences and decreasing bicycle theft and other theft violations, with findings being driven by late-entry areas of such policies. (4) A change in the local lockdown scheme implemented by the government in October 2020 does not have a markedly dissimilar effect on criminal activity compared to the earlier scheme. (5) Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that government-mandated lockdowns reduced the economic costs of crime by approximately £4.3 billion for the country as a whole (in 2020 British pounds).
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
This paper seeks to evaluate the impact of the removal of restrictions (partial and complete) imposed during COVID-19-induced lockdowns on property offences such as robbery, burglary, and theft during the milder wave one and the more severe wave two of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, respectively. Using 10-year data of the daily counts of crimes, the authors adopt an auto-regressive neural networks method to make counterfactual predictions of crimes, representing a scenario without the pandemic-induced lockdowns. The difference between the actual and forecast is the causal impact of the lockdown in all phases. Further, the research uses Google Mobility Community Reports to measure mobility. The analysis has been done at two levels: first, for the state of Tamil Nadu, which has a sizeable rural landscape, and second for Chennai, the largest metropolitan city with an urban populace. During the pandemic-induced lockdown in wave one, there was a steep decline in the incidence of property...
Six months in: pandemic crime trends in England and Wales
Crime Science
Governments around the world have enforced strict guidelines on social interaction and mobility to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Evidence has begun to emerge which suggests that such dramatic changes in people’s routine activities have yielded similarly dramatic changes in criminal behavior. This study represents the first ‘look back’ on six months of the nationwide lockdown in England and Wales. Using open police-recorded crime trends, we provide a comparison between expected and observed crime rates for fourteen different offence categories between March and August, 2020. We find that most crime types experienced sharp, short-term declines during the first full month of lockdown. This was followed by a gradual resurgence as restrictions were relaxed. Major exceptions include anti-social behavior and drug crimes. Findings shed light on the opportunity structures for crime and the nuances of using police records to study crime during the pandemic.
2021
The objective of this paper is to assess the relationship between The Spring 2020 COVID-19 Lockdown and the levels of crime in New York City (NYC) and London. Our proposition, derived from the Routine Activity Theory (RAT), the ‘breaches’ theory and input from the 2020 research on lockdown and crime, hypothesised that lockdown measures would lead to reductions in crime. The crime categories selected for this study were: homicide, rape, robbery, violence against a person, burglary, theft and vehicle theft. T-test, F-test and the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression calculations were used to test the hypotheses. The four-month lockdown period in 2020 produced a 15% and 31% crime reduction in NYC and London, respectively. In the case of London, the overall results indicate that changes in routine human activities were indeed largely correlated with the reduction in crime. However, crime patterns in NYC in spring 2020 turned out to be inconsistent. A comparison of crime patterns unde...
Cybercrime in America amid COVID-19: the Initial Results from a Natural Experiment
American Journal of Criminal Justice
The COVID-19 pandemic has radically altered life, killing hundreds of thousands of people and leading many countries to issue "stay-at-home" orders to contain the virus's spread. Based on insights from routine activity theory (Cohen & Felson 1979), it is likely that COVID-19 will influence victimization rates as people alter their routines and spend more time at home and less time in public. Yet, the pandemic may affect victimization differently depending on the type of crime as street crimes appear to be decreasing while domestic crimes may be increasing. We consider a third type of crime: cybercrime. Treating the pandemic as a natural experiment, we investigate how the pandemic has affected rates of cybervictimization. We compare pre-pandemic rates of victimization with post-pandemic rates of victimization using datasets designed to track cybercrime. After considering how the pandemic may alter routines and affect cybervictimization, we find that the pandemic has not radically altered cyberroutines nor changed cybervictimization rates. However, a model using routine activity theory to predict cybervictimization offers clear support for the theory's efficacy both before and after the pandemic. We conclude by considering plausible explanations for our findings.