IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cep/cepcvd/cepcovid-19-027.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Covid-19 and local crime rates in England and Wales - two years into the pandemic

Author

Listed:
  • Shubhangi Agrawal
  • Tom Kirchmaier
  • Carmen Villa-Llera

Abstract

We analyse how crime trends evolved during the Covid-19 pandemic leveraging public data on local crimes. Police have recorded fewer crimes overall during the pandemic, and the decrease is driven by a large decrease in acquisitive offences. Except for online fraud, crimes in which offenders obtain a material gain - such as burglary or theft - are now less common than pre-Covid. This trend is likely to remain, as more people work from home and shop online. Violent crimes, which have been on the rise since 2014, remain at very high levels and did not decrease because of the pandemic. Public order offences (incidents in which offenders cause public fear, alarm, or distress) have also accelerated since Covid began. We also show that the pandemic has not decreased crimes uniformly. Some areas (37 per cent) had more crimes in 2021 than during the same period in 2019. Unemployment and lower educational attainment appear to be key characteristics of areas that had higher crimes in 2021.

Suggested Citation

  • Shubhangi Agrawal & Tom Kirchmaier & Carmen Villa-Llera, 2022. "Covid-19 and local crime rates in England and Wales - two years into the pandemic," CEP Covid-19 Analyses cepcovid-19-027, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    • Handle: RePEc:cep:cepcvd:cepcovid-19-027
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cepcovid-19-027.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Kyriakos C. Neanidis & Maria P. Rana, 2023. "Crime in the era of COVID‐19: Evidence from England," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 63(5), pages 1100-1130, November.
    2. Tom Kirchmaier & Carmen Villa-Llera, 2020. "Covid-19 and changing crime trends in England and Wales," CEP Covid-19 Analyses cepcovid-19-013, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kandaswamy Paramasivan & Rahul Subburaj & Saish Jaiswal & Nandan Sudarsanam, 2022. "Empirical evidence of the impact of mobility on property crimes during the first two waves of the COVID-19 pandemic," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 9(1), pages 1-14, December.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Carlos Díaz & Sebastian Fossati & Nicolás Trajtenberg, 2022. "Stay at home if you can: COVID‐19 stay‐at‐home guidelines and local crime," Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 19(4), pages 1067-1113, December.
    2. Kyriakos C. Neanidis & Maria P. Rana, 2023. "Crime in the era of COVID‐19: Evidence from England," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 63(5), pages 1100-1130, November.
    3. Mouratidis, Kostas, 2021. "How COVID-19 reshaped quality of life in cities: A synthesis and implications for urban planning," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 111(C).
    4. Jesse Matheson & Brendon McConnell & James Rockey & Argyris Sakalis, 2023. "Do Remote Workers Deter Neighborhood Crime? Evidence from the Rise of Working from Home," Working Papers 2023020, The University of Sheffield, Department of Economics.
    5. Eric Halford, 2022. "An Exploration of the Impact of COVID-19 on Police Demand, Capacity and Capability," Social Sciences, MDPI, vol. 11(7), pages 1-24, July.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Covid-19; Crime;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cep:cepcvd:cepcovid-19-027. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/covid-19-analyses/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.