Abstract
Confronted by rapidly growing infection rates, hospitalizations and deaths, governments around the world have introduced stringent containment measures to help reduce the spread of COVID-19. This public health response has had an unprecedented impact on people’s daily lives which, unsurprisingly, has also had widely observed implications in terms of crime and public safety. Drawing upon theories from environmental criminology, this study examines officially recorded property crime rates between March and June 2020 as reported for the state of Queensland, Australia. We use ARIMA modeling techniques to compute 6-month-ahead forecasts of property damage, shop theft, residential burglary, fraud, and motor vehicle theft rates and then compare these forecasts (and their 95% confidence intervals) with the observed data for March through to June. We conclude that, with the exception of fraud, all property offence categories declined significantly. For some offence types (shop stealing, other theft offences, and residential burglary), the decrease commenced as early as March. For other offence types, the decline was lagged and did not occur until April or May. Non-residential burglary was the only offence type to significantly increase, which it did in March, only to then decline significantly thereafter. These trends, while broadly consistent across the state’s 77 local government areas still varied in meaningful ways and we discuss possible explanations and implications.
Highlights
The declaration by the World Health Organization (WHO) of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID19) outbreak, caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), as a public health emergency of international concern on 30 January 2020, led governments around the world to take drastic action and implement a wide range of proactive and reactive measures to limit the spread of the disease
Our study explores several common types of property crime—property damage, shop theft, residential and non-residential burglary, robbery, fraud and motor vehicle theft—and we draw upon environmental criminology to understand how these crimes might be impacted by Queensland’s containment measures
Our study aims to add to this knowledge by exploring trends in property crime amidst the social distancing measures put into place to deal with the pandemic in Queensland Australia
Summary
The declaration by the World Health Organization (WHO) of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID19) outbreak, caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2), as a public health emergency of international concern on 30 January 2020, led governments around the world to take drastic action and implement a wide range of proactive and reactive measures to limit the spread of the disease. With fewer people accessing retail outlets and business districts, and more people staying home, scholars have quickly turned their attention to the impact this might have on the routine activities which typically underscore the incidence of common property crimes. Understanding these short- and medium-term impacts is important to inform how to respond, as the. Payne et al Crime Sci (2021) 10:7 pandemic and various levels of containment are likely to persist for some time yet (Miller and Blumstein 2020). As we will discuss, studies have produced mixed findings, indicating that even when faced with similar changes in mobility, crime is likely to be heavily influenced by the underlying opportunity structures that feature at the local and micro-levels (Felson et al 2020; Rosenfeld and Lopez 2020)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
