Six months in: pandemic crime trends in England and Wales

Abstract

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.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Langton, S Dixon, A Farrell, G https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3987-8457
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2021. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
Keywords:	COVID-19; Time series; ARIMA; Routine activities; Opportunity theory; Pandemic; Mobility
Dates:	Accepted: 17 February 2021 Published (online): 4 March 2021 Published: 4 March 2021
Institution:	The University of Leeds
Academic Units:	The University of Leeds > Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law (Leeds) > School of Law (Leeds)
Funding Information:	Funder Grant number RCUK (Research Councils UK) ES/V00445X/1
Depositing User:	Symplectic Publications
Date Deposited:	22 Feb 2021 16:30
Last Modified:	25 Jun 2023 22:35
Status:	Published
Publisher:	SpringerOpen
Identification Number:	10.1186/s40163-021-00142-z
Related URLs:	Dataset
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:171359