Disentangling community-level changes in crime trends during the COVID-19 pandemic in Chicago

Abstract

Recent studies exploiting city-level time series have shown that, around the world, several crimes declined after COVID-19 containment policies have been put in place. Using data at the community-level in Chicago, this work aims to advance our understanding on how public interventions affected criminal activities at a finer spatial scale. The analysis relies on a two-step methodology. First, it estimates the community-wise causal impact of social distancing and shelter-in-place policies adopted in Chicago via Structural Bayesian Time-Series across four crime categories (i.e., burglary, assault, narcotics-related offenses, and robbery). Once the models detected the direction, magnitude and significance of the trend changes, Firth’s Logistic Regression is used to investigate the factors associated to the statistically significant crime reduction found in the first step of the analyses. Statistical results first show that changes in crime trends differ across communities and crime types. This suggests that beyond the results of aggregate models lies a complex picture characterized by diverging patterns. Second, regression models provide mixed findings regarding the correlates associated with significant crime reduction: several relations have opposite directions across crimes with population being the only factor that is stably and positively associated with significant crime reduction.

Exploring regional variability in the short-term impact of COVID-19 on property crime in Queensland, Australia

“…While there was a demonstrable change in mobility towards the end of March, the largest impact on mobility was not observed—and then sustained—until the month of April. Changes in property crime have tended to follow the expected pattern, given the changes to mobility, and are largely consistent with studies conducted overseas and in Australia (Ashby 2020a ; Boman and Gallupe 2020 ; Borrion et al 2020 ; Campedelli et al 2020a , b ; Felson et al 2020 ; Gerell et al 2020 ; Halford et al 2020 ; Kim and Leung 2020 ; Mohler et al 2020 ; Rmandic et al 2020 ; Rosenfeld and Lopez 2020 ). In fact, it would appear that the significant reductions in crime observed in Queensland exceeded those observed in the United States, and are higher than those observed in the only other Australian studies to date (Kim and Leung 2020 ; Rmandic et al 2020 ).…”

“…Property crimes, including shoplifting and thefts, decreased, as did crime overall, and these trends were amplified during the period of more stringent measures. In a follow-up paper, Campedelli et al ( 2020b ) assessed how COVID-19-related containment policies were associated with different crime types at the community-level in Chicago and found that changes in crime trends differed across both communities and crime types.…”

“…Further, the variation between cities suggests different effects, which is likely a consequence of the different containment measures (and timing of those measures) and different patterns of crime that exists within those settings; the latter being heavily influenced by underlying opportunity structures. This is reflected in results of the small number of studies which have disaggregated results by neighbourhood or LGA (Campedelli et al 2020b ; Rmandic et al 2020 ). Our study aims to add to this knowledge by exploring trends in property crime amidst the social distancing measures put into place to deal with the pandemic in Queensland Australia.…”

COVID and crime: An early empirical look

“…In a recent working paper, McDonald and Balkin (2020) simply report changes in crime rates in four major U.S. cities relative to the prior year without any standard errors. Other papers focus on specific jurisdictions, including Chicago ( Campedelli et al, 2020b ), Los Angeles ( Campedelli et al, 2020a ) Queensland, Australia ( Payne and Morgan, 2020a , Payne and Morgan, 2020b ), and Lancashire, UK ( Halford et al, 2020 ). These analyses report mixed results from little change in Queensland to substantial declines in crime in Los Angeles.…”

Spatial Patterns of COVID-19 Incidence in Relation to Crime Rate Across London

“…Those studies took no account of other socioeconomic factors affecting occurrence of crime. Although a recent study focused on spatial variations in crime trend, the influential factors fail to account for the extent of COVID-19 infection [17]. To abridge the research gaps, we investigated the spatial association of COVID-19 infection rate and crime rates after controlling for socioeconomic factors.…”