Abstract
Data from 25 large U.S. cities is assembled to estimate the impact of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic on crime. There is a widespread immediate drop in both criminal incidents and arrests most heavily pronounced among drug crimes, theft, residential burglaries, and most violent crimes. The decline appears to precede stay-at-home orders, and arrests follow a similar pattern as reports. There is no decline in homicides and shootings, and an increase in non-residential burglary and car theft in most cities, suggesting that criminal activity was displaced to locations with fewer people. Pittsburgh, New York City, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington DC and Chicago each saw overall crime drops of at least 35%. Evidence from police-initiated reports and geographic variation in crime change suggests that most of the observed changes are not due to changes in crime reporting.
Highlights
The Coronavirus pandemic that began in China in December, 2019 and in the U.S in January, 2020 (Holshue et al 2020) caused the biggest voluntary impact on the economy in U.S history
A crucial question regarding the interpretation of the findings in this paper and any using crime incident data is: to what extent do changes in observed crime reflect changes in the real level of crime, rather than changes in reporting of crime? I attempt to shed some light on the question and present suggestive evidence that much of the crime change is not a reporting artifact
It is possible to bound the contribution of reporting changes to observed crime rate change under the assumption that all of the increase in police share of reports is due to missing reports from non-police
Summary
The Coronavirus pandemic that began in China in December, 2019 and in the U.S in January, 2020 (Holshue et al 2020) caused the biggest voluntary impact on the economy in U.S history It changed the nature of policing, criminal opportunities, and criminal penalties. There was massive job loss as businesses across the country closed (Chetty et al 2020) Together, this has resulted in a change in the opportunities for crime, probability of observation, capture, arrest, prosecution and penalty. For I assume no change in the reporting rate, but return to this crucial assumption in Section V below Crimes vary in their primary source of detection – police, public, or victim. The lack of street traffic could increase likelihood of detection by police, as individuals on the street are more noticeable
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