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Poverty and Crime: COVID and the 'New Normal'
... Globally, public health measures in response to COVID-19 (C19) impacted upon a variety of health and wellbeing factors, including alcohol consumption and violence [1][2][3][4]. Crime rates, including violence, were also impacted by restrictions on social interaction, access to on-licensed premises and mobility amongst the population [5][6][7][8]. Recently, studies have sought to assess short term changes in violence owing to the C19 pandemic [6,9,11,12]. ...
... This addition did not improve upon the model fit and resulted in an insignificant coefficient suggesting, on aggregate, the trends observed in the pandemic period did not depart significantly from what might have ordinarily been expected/predicted. 5 The onset of the pandemic was thus not retained as a covariate in further modelling; settling instead on the base model. ...
... Having identified a suitable model specification for the violence time series on aggregate, SARIMA models of the same specification were subsequently run for each type of violence separately; with the (0,1,1)(0,1,1) [26] being a good fit for all series as indicated by the Ljung-Box test of 5 Further sensitivity analysis was done by testing the effect of this coefficient for all models ran on subtypes of violence. Its introduction in all such models yielded in the same results. ...
Background
The COVID-19 pandemic, and associated public health measures, had a marked impact on a number of health and wellbeing outcomes, including alcohol use and violence. Current literature presents a mixed view of the impact of the pandemic on violence trends. The current study utilises police offence data from a region of northern England to examine the impact of lockdowns, and subsequent relaxation of restrictions, on trends in violent offences.
Methods
Time series analyses using seasonal auto-regressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) modelling was used to investigate the impacts of the COVID-19 public health measures on weekly offence trends from April 1 2018 to March 20 2021. Additionally, pre-pandemic data were used to forecast expected trends had the pandemic not occurred. These expected trends were then compared to actual data to determine if the average levels of violence were outside the forecasted expectations. Overall violence and six subtypes (violence with and without injury, sexual offences including rape, domestic violence, and alcohol-related violent offences) were examined.
Results
Overall, the observed trend in police recorded violent offences demonstrated fluctuating patterns in line with commencement and easing of public health restrictions. That is, offence numbers declined during lockdowns and increased after relaxation of restrictions. However, the majority of observed values fell within the expected range. This broad pattern was also found for subtypes of violent offences.
Conclusions
While violent crime trends demonstrated fluctuations with lockdowns, and subsequent easing of restrictions, these changes were not demonstrably larger than expected trends within this English region, suggesting that a sustained amplification in violence was not observed within this data. However, it is important to acknowledge the high levels of violence reported in this region across the study period, which should be used as a key driver for investing in long-term approaches to violence prevention. Given the extent of unreported violence generally, and that victims/survivors may come into contact with other support services (without reporting to the police), it is vital that policy and practice decisions take a holistic approach, considering a broad range of data sources.
... A decrease was observed in all types of crime except for anti-social behavior and drug offenses during the first quarantine period from mid-March to mid-May 2020 in England and Wales (Kirchmaier & Villa-Llera, 2020). Observed rates of property violations reported in the Australian State of Queensland were compared across crime types. ...
Criminal behavior, which takes its content from society, has been associated with social isolation, national quarantine, and mandatory stay-at-home measures during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it has been researched through crime rates. Moreover, it has been argued that changes in the level of social mobility also affect crime rates. Decreased crime rates have been reported during closure measures, and a significant literature has emerged based on these propositions. This study's retrospective approach was created to examine the appearance of crime rates in Türkiye. The main problem of the research is to reveal the relationship between crime, pandemic, and social mobility in Türkiye. For this purpose, it aimed to test the propositions based on a dual approach. First, patterns in crime rates were discovered. The data set regarding the most common crime types between 2018 and 2022, including pre-pandemic crime rates, was used. The most appropriate time series model was determined to understand the data structure regarding crime types, and it was tested whether there was a decrease or increase in crime rates during and after the pandemic. As a second step, the effect of social mobility on the change in crime was examined according to the mobility level data reported in this process. Evidence has shown decreased violence, theft, and drug crimes in the early part of the pandemic, consistent with the literature. While theft crimes decreased throughout the pandemic, violence and drug crimes increased. The view that crime rates will decrease if social mobility is restricted as a source of social life presented overlapping data in the pandemic. Changes in social mobility during the pandemic have affected crime rates for theft, injury, and drug use. Although there was a decrease in crime rates due to seasonal effects after the normalization process, it was observed that crime rates could change according to the content of social measures during the pandemic period. It is considered that this situation presents a particular slice for the future.
While the harmful effects of both Covid-19 and the measures taken in response are becoming clearer, there remain many important questions about the respective legacies of the public health measures, in particular, the lockdowns.
This study reinvestigates the relationship between unemployment and crime, but is the first to focus explicitly on the effects of long-term unemployment on crime. A unique finding is that long-term unemployment shows a strong association with violent crime, an effect which is greater than that of total unemployment on property crime in this and most previous studies. Long-term unemployment thus identifies a marginal group for committing crime (particularly violent crime) better than total unemployment, with the duration of unemployment plausibly increasing the strain that fosters violent behaviour.
In this paper we examine the influence of unemployment on property crimes and on violent crimes in France for the period 1990 to 2000. This analysis is the first extensive study for this country. We construct a regional-level data set (for the 95 départements of metropolitan France) with measures of crimes as reported to the Ministry of Interior. To assess social conditions prevailing in the département in that year, we construct measures of the share of unemployed as well as other social, economic, and demographic variables using multiple waves of the French Labor Survey. We estimate a classic Becker-type model in which unemployment is a measure of how potential criminals fare in the legitimate job market. First, our estimates show that in the cross-section dimension, crime and unemployment are positively associated. Second, we find that increases in youth unemployment induce increases in crime. Using the predicted industrial structure to instrument unemployment, we show that this effect is causal for burglaries, thefts, and drug offenses. To combat crime, it appears thus that all strategies designed to combat youth unemployment should be examined. (JEL: J19, K42, J64, J65) (c) 2009 by the European Economic Association.
To study the problem of widespread youth crime, the author analyzes a time-allocation model in which consumers face parametric wages and diminishing marginal returns to crime. The theory motivates an econometric model that he estimates using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The author's estimates suggest that youth behavior is responsive to price incentives and that falling real wages may have been an important determinant of rising youth crime during the 1970s and 1980s. Moreover, wage differentials explain a substantial component of both the racial differential in criminal participation and the age distribution of crime. Copyright 1998 by University of Chicago Press.
In economic models of crime, changing economic incentives alter the participation of individuals in criminal activities. We critically appraise the work in this area. After a brief overview of the workhorse economics of crime model for organizing our discussion on crime and economic incentives, we first document the significant rise of the economics of crime as a research field and then go on to review the evidence on the relationship between crime and economic incentives. We divide this discussion into incentives operating through legal wages in the formal labor market and the economic returns to illegal activities. Evidence that economic incentives matter for crime emerges from both.
Unemployment and the claimant count are both important measures of spare labour capacity in the UK economy. However, they each record subtly different aspects of the non-utilisation of labour. Unemployment estimates are based on a person's self-classification as being ‘out of work, but ‘currently and actively seeking to work’ in the Labour Force Survey (LFS), while the claimant count is a count of the number of people who claim unemployment related benefits (the majority of whom claim Jobseeker's allowance (JSA)). This article examines the reasons that the two measures provide different estimates, and presents analysis on the groups of people that make up the gap between unemployment and the claimant count. The article finds that the differences in definitions contribute to this gap, but there are also other reasons for the changing size of the gap.
A theory of participation in illegitimate activities is developed and tested against data on variations in index crimes across states in the United States. Theorems and behavioral implications are derived using the state preference approach to behavior under uncertainty. The investigation deals directly with the interaction between offense and defense: crime and collective law enforcement. It indicates the existence of a deterrent effect of law-enforcement activity on all crimes and a strong positive correlation between income inequality and crimes against property. The empirical results also provide some tentative estimates of the effectiveness of law enforcement in reducing crime and the resulting social losses.
Crime dropped sharply and unexpectedly in the United States in the 1990s. I conclude that four factors collectively explain the entire drop in crime: increases in the number of police, increases in the size of the prison population, the waning of the crack epidemic, and the legalization of abortion in the 1970s. Other common explanations for declining crime appear far less important. The factors identified are much less successful in explaining fluctuations in crime in the preceding two decades. The real puzzle is not why crime fell in the 1990s, but rather, why crime did not begin falling earlier.
Furloughing of workers across UK businesses: 23
- B Chiripanhura
Crime and punishment: An economic approach
- G S Becker
- A Evans