Abstract
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has had tremendous and extensive impacts on the people’s daily activities. In Chicago, the numbers of crime fell considerably. This work aims to investigate the impacts that COVID-19 has had on the spatial and temporal patterns of crime in Chicago through spatial and temporal crime analyses approaches. The Seasonal-Trend decomposition procedure based on Loess (STL) was used to identify the temporal trends of different crimes, detect the outliers of crime events, and examine the periodic variations of crime distributions. The results showed a certain phase pattern in the trend components of assault, battery, fraud, and theft. The largest outlier occurred on 31 May 2020 in the remainder components of burglary, criminal damage, and robbery. The spatial point pattern test (SPPT) was used to detect the similarity between the spatial distribution patterns of crime in 2020 and those in 2019, 2018, 2017, and 2016, and to analyze the local changes in crime on a micro scale. It was found that the distributions of crime significantly changed in 2020 and local changes in theft, battery, burglary, and fraud displayed an aggregative cluster downtown. The results all claim that spatial and temporal patterns of crime changed significantly affected by COVID-19 in Chicago, and they offer constructive suggestions for local police departments or authorities to allocate their available resources in response to crime.
Highlights
The recent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has had widespread and unprecedented impacts on people’s daily lives, economic development, politics, and social harmony [1]
Some common temporal analysis approaches can be used for crime analysis, such as interrupted time series analysis (ITSA), Autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models, Bayesian structural time-series (BSTS) models, X11 decomposition, and Seasonal extraction in ARIMA time series (SEATS) decomposition
We investigated the changes of seven types of crime in Chicago over a complete period of the first wave pandemic based on spatial and temporal crime analyses
Summary
The recent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has had widespread and unprecedented impacts on people’s daily lives, economic development, politics, and social harmony [1]. The COVID-19 pandemic had an impact on crimes [2]. Overall crimes have dropped sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic [3,4]. The relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and crimes has varied in terms of types of crimes [5]. It was found that the social distancing guidelines have a statistically significant impact on certain types of crimes: some crimes may decrease (e.g., burglary and robbery), and some crimes may increase (e.g., domestic violence) [6]. It has been shown that robbery, shoplifting, theft, and battery have dropped during the COVID-19 pandemic in Los
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