Anti-social behaviour in the coronavirus pandemic

Abstract

Anti-social behaviour recorded by police more than doubled early in the coronavirus pandemic in England and Wales. This was a stark contrast to the steep falls in most types of recorded crime. Why was ASB so different? Was it changes in ‘traditional’ ASB such as noisy neighbours, or was it ASB records of breaches of COVID-19 regulations? Further, why did police-recorded ASB find much larger early-pandemic increases than the Telephone Crime Survey for England and Wales? This study uses two approaches to address the issues. The first is a survey of police forces, via Freedom of Information requests, to determine whether COVID-regulation breaches were recorded as ASB. The second is natural language processing (NLP) used to interrogate the text details of police ASB records. We find police recording practice varied greatly between areas. We conclude that the early-pandemic increases in recorded ASB were primarily due to breaches of COVID regulations but around half of these also involved traditional forms of ASB. We also suggest that the study offers proof of concept that NLP may have significant general potential to exploit untapped police text records in ways that inform policing and crime policy.

Post-Pandemic Crime Trends in England and Wales

“…ASB and drug offences increased in Year 1. The ASB spike in first lockdown was because breaches of covid restrictions were often recorded as ASB, this returning to expected levels in Year 2 as the relevant regulations largely ceased (Halford et al 2022). Drug offence increases were attributed to increased police stop and search early in the pandemic when street drug dealing was conspicuous on deserted streets (Neanadis & Rana 2022).…”

Human Response to Plague: a Literary and Sociologic Perspective

“…The fear of the disease may lapse into foolish behaviors, as verbal assaults towards healthcare workers or people underlying the severity of the spreading contagion: «Even the eminent Settala […] was forced to seek refuge into a friend's house from the popular fury, because he had constantly urged the need of precautionary measures» (4). At the same time, looting and robberies and antisocial behaviours were unfortunately recurrent too (10). News about robbed couriers and supermarkets were reported not only during the first lockdown, but also in Manzoni's novel:…”

Crime in the era of COVID‐19: Evidence from England

“…Examples include noisy neighbors, vandalism, graffiti, public drunkenness, littering, and illegal waste disposal. We abstain from including in our analysis this offence, however, because during the pandemic and the accompanying lockdowns most police forces in the UK registered breaches of COVID-19 restrictions in their jurisdictions as incidences of anti-social behavior (see Halford et al, 2022;Office for National Statistics, 2022). This supports the argument that lockdowns created a distortion in the way this offence was measured before and during the pandemic, confounding an estimation of its true effect.…”