Changes in Crime Rates During the COVID-19 Pandemic

• Activity Number: 325 - Investigating COVID-19 and the Criminal Legal System, Policing, and Crime
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 9, 2022 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Social Statistics Section
• Author(s): Mikaela M Meyer* and Ahmed Hassafy and Gina Lewis and Prasun Shrestha and Amelia M. Haviland and Daniel Nagin
• Companies: Carnegie Mellon University and Carnegie Mellon University and Carnegie Mellon University and Carnegie Mellon University and Carnegie Mellon University and Carnegie Mellon University
• Keywords: COVID-19; crime rates; government statistics

Abstract

We estimate changes in the rates of five FBI Part 1 crimes during the 2020 Spring pandemic lockdown period and the period after the killing of George Floyd through December 2020. Using weekly crime rate data from 29 of the 70 largest cities in the U.S. from January 2018 through December 2020, three linear regression model specifications are used to detect changes. One detects whether crime trends in four 2020 pre- and post-pandemic periods differ from those in 2018 and 2019. A second looks in more detail at the spring 2020 lockdowns to detect whether crime trends changed over successive biweekly periods into the lockdown. The third uses a city-level openness index to examine whether the degree of openness was associated with changing crime rates. Homicide and auto theft increased significantly during all or most of the pandemic whereas robbery and larceny significantly declined during all or part of the pandemic, and burglary rates did not change. Only larceny rates fluctuated with the degree of each city’s lockdown. While opportunity theory is a tempting post-hoc explanation of some of these findings no single crime theory provides a plausible explanation of all the results.