The stay-at-home restrictions to control the spread of COVID-19 led to unparalleled sudden change in daily life, but it is unclear how they affected urban crime globally. We collected data on daily counts of crime in 27 cities across 23 countries in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. We conducted interrupted time series analyses to assess the impact of stay-at-home restrictions on different types of crime in each city. Our findings show that the stay-at-home policies were associated with a considerable drop in urban crime, but with substantial variation across cities and types of crime. Meta-regression results showed that more stringent restrictions over movement in public space were predictive of larger declines in crime.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate the associations between criminality of family members and individual offending. The main focus is on investigating the extent to which criminal offending by siblings is associated with individual offending, as well as the extent to which parental and grandparental offending accounts for this relationship. Methods Using official conviction data on three generations of Dutch individuals who are at elevated risk of offending, multilevel logistic regression analyses were performed. Results The analyses showed that sibling offending increased the risk of individual offending. Parental and grandparental offending only partially accounted for this association. However, parental offending and offending by grandfathers increased the risk of individual offending as well. Furthermore, the analyses showed that offending by brothers and sisters both increased the risk of offending for both men and women. Conclusions Sibling criminality seems to be a risk factor in its own right. Therefore, focusing only on children of criminal parents is insufficient. Furthermore, it was found that almost every subsequent offending family member adds risk for children to offend.

We assess to what extent the associations between marriage and offending differ for high-risk men marrying in two distinct periods : 1930-70 and 1971-2006. Between these two periods, power relations between the sexes, laws governing marriage and in general the role and expectations attached to marriage differed. Based on these differences, we argue that -following two explanations for the 'marriage effect', that is the control and the social capital explanation -a different effect of marriage is expected for the two marriage cohorts. Our results confirm these expectations and thus provide support for both explanations.

Objectives Using a vignette study, we investigated the relative attractiveness as cohabitation partners of five different types of offenders, male as well as female. Methods Respondents advised a hypothetical person whether he or she should start cohabiting with his or her partner who had offended once. Gender and type of offence were systematically varied. Results Our findings suggest that violent offenders are equally attractive as serious property offenders. Against expectation, perpetrators of relational violence are not rated as less attractive than other violent offenders, even if they are male, and also when females are the raters. Male violent offenders are rated as less attractive cohabitation partners than female violent offenders. Sex offenders are the least attractive cohabitation partners, particularly those who had offended against a child. Conclusions Crime type matters: sex offending impacted consistently negatively on cohabitation advice. This effect may be partly due to the fact that many regard sex offenders as incurable and 'deviant.' Violent offending did not elicit markedly negative advice. Perhaps it was considered less of a risk because of the message in the vignette that the prospective cohabitants had a good relationship. It may also be that many young people have been in a fight or have slapped someone in their lives, and, therefore, downplay the seriousness of this offence.