Six months in: pandemic crime trends in England and Wales

Samuel Langton,Anthony Dixon,Graham Farrell

doi:10.1186/s40163-021-00142-z

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.

Highlights

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on societies around the world
This paper investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on crime and anti-social behavior using six months of open police-recorded data in England and Wales
In the JDI Special Papers series we outlined an initial typology of pandemic crime effects (Farrell 2020) and models of post-lockdown crime outcomes (Farrell and Birks 2020), and in the Statistical Bulletin on Crime and COVID-19 we explored emerging issues in crime trends and its distribution nationally and locally (e.g. Dixon et al 2020a, b, c; Dixon and Farrell 2020a; Langton 2020; see Farrell et al 2020)

Summary

Introduction

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on societies around the world. Mortality rates, healthcare systems, economic performance, mental well-being, social interactions and mobility have experienced unprecedented change in response to both the virus itself and attempts to control its spread. Curbs on citizens’ mobility and social interactions have been widely deployed by local and national governments to stem the spread of COVID-19. Countries adopting stay at home policies witnessed a change in citizen mobility and routine activities in a manner which was both instantaneous and unprecedented. These alterations in daily life, globally detectable and recorded using measures of seismic activity, have been described as the ‘great quiet period’ in human mobility (Lecocq et al 2020)

Objectives

Results

Conclusion