Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically affected social life. In efforts to reduce the spread of the virus, countries around the world implemented social restrictions, including social distancing, working from home, and the shuttering of numerous businesses. These social restrictions have also affected crime rates. In this study, we investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the frequency of offending (crimes include property, violent, mischief, and miscellaneous) in Queensland, Australia. In particular, we examine this impact across numerous settings, including rural, regional and urban. We measure these shifts across the restriction period, as well as the staged relaxation of these restrictions. In order to measure impact of this period we use structural break tests. In general, we find that criminal offences have significantly decreased during the initial lockdown, but as expected, increased once social restrictions were relaxed. These findings were consistent across Queensland’s districts, save for two areas. We discuss how these findings are important for criminal justice and social service practitioners when operating within an extraordinary event.
Highlights
With its origins in Wuhan, China in late 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has spread around the world (Readfern 2020)
We investigate the impact COVID-19 on the opportunity structures for crime in Queensland, Australia
We explored the rates of different crime types across the state of Queensland, Australia before, during and after the COVID-19-related lockdown
Summary
With its origins in Wuhan, China in late 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has spread around the world (Readfern 2020). Aside from essential workers (health care providers, front-line officers, food services, etc.) and limited trips for groceries, medical concerns, and exercise, governments instructed residents to stay home. Exceptional events, such as the COVID-19 global pandemic, though catastrophic in a number of dimensions, provide opportunities for natural experiments. These natural experiments can be used to test our theories of human behaviour that can be used to (hopefully) improve societal responses to future exceptional events, planned or otherwise. The introduction of social restrictions related to COVID-19 radically impacted human movement patterns (Google 2020) with significant reductions in movement away from the home
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