Crisis and disruption are often unpredictable and can create opportunities for crime. During such times, policing may also need to meet additional challenges to handle the disruption. The use of social media by officials can be essential for crisis mitigation and crime reduction. In this paper, we study the use of Twitter for crime mitigation and reduction by UK police (and associated) agencies in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Our findings suggest that whilst most of the tweets from our sample concerned issues that were not specifically about crime, especially during the first stages of the pandemic, there was a significant increase in tweets about fraud, cybercrime and domestic abuse. There was also an increase in retweeting activity as opposed to the creation of original messages. Moreover, in terms of the impact of tweets, as measured by the rate at which they are retweeted, followers were more likely to ‘spread the word’ when the tweet was content-rich (discussed a crime specific matter and contained media), and account holders were themselves more active on Twitter. Considering the changing world we live in, criminal opportunity is likely to evolve. To help mitigate this, policy makers and researchers should consider more systematic approaches to developing social media communication strategies for the purpose of crime mitigation and reduction during disruption and change more generally. We suggest a framework for so doing.
Objectives Routine activity theory suggests that levels of crime are affected by peoples’ activity patterns. Here, we examine if, through their impact on people’s on- and off-line activities, COVID-19 restriction affected fraud committed on- and off-line during the pandemic. Our expectation was that levels of online offending would closely follow changes to mobility and online activity—with crime increasing as restrictions were imposed (and online activity increased) and declining as they were relaxed. For doorstep fraud, which has a different opportunity structure, our expectation was that the reverse would be true. Method COVID-19 restrictions systematically disrupted people’s activity patterns, creating quasi-experimental conditions well-suited to testing the effects of “interventions” on crime. We exploit those conditions using ARIMA time series models and UK data for online shopping fraud, hacking, doorstep fraud, online sales, and mobility to test hypotheses. Doorstep fraud is modelled as a non-equivalent dependent variable, allowing us to test whether findings were selective and in line with theoretical expectations. Results After controlling for other factors, levels of crime committed online were positively associated with monthly variation in online activities and negatively associated with monthly variation in mobility. In contrast, and as expected, monthly variation in doorstep fraud was positively associated with changes in mobility. Conclusions We find evidence consistent with routine activity theory, suggesting that disruptions to people’s daily activity patterns affect levels of crime committed both on- and off-line. The theoretical implications of the findings, and the need to develop a better evidence base about what works to reduce online crime, are discussed.
On 30 January 2020 the World Health Organisation declared the outbreak of Covid-19 a “Public Health Emergency of International concern” which posed an unprecedented threat. Chief police officers recognised that quick decisions needed to be taken, working with partners to ensure public safety and to help contain the spread of the virus. The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) assumed the lead for the national policing response, using an enhanced cross portfolio command structure named Operation Talla.The work described in this report was commissioned by the NPCC and conducted by the Dawes Centre for Future Crime at UCL, in consultation with Op Talla, to understand the effects of the pandemic on the policing response and future impacts. Here, we report the findings of the (Delphi) study, the aims of which were to elicit expert opinion from a wide range of UK law enforcement agency stakeholders (LEAs) to understand their perspectives about the police response to the pandemic, how the pandemic affected policing, what worked well and should continue, how the pandemic affected crime, and how crime mightchange as a consequence of other future drivers of changes (e.g. climate change, Brexit andtechnological change).
Theories of crime emphasize the role of different causal factors. Some focus on what psychological (or similar) factors motivate offending, ignoring the role of crime opportunity, while others focus on the latter, taking offender motivation as a given. Testing such theories is difficult absent significant events that influence both, but the COVID-19 pandemic has created such conditions. As a consequence of government containment policies, we have seen dramatic changes to people’s day-to-day activities, with people spending more time at home (ONSa, 2020; ILO 2020) and more time online (Kemp et al., 2021), reducing opportunities for crime in urban environments but increasing them online. Equally, by restricting mobility, containment policies have had the potential to cause economic and emotional strain that would affect offender motivation – in the short-term at least. Here, we test if and how COVID-19 containment policies impacted upon different types of fraud committed online and in a physical context. According to offender-focused explanations, the strain caused by the pandemic would be expected to lead to increases in crime, which should largely persist regardless of subsequent variation in macro level changes to people’s routine activities. According to opportunity theories of crime, we would also expect crime to change, but for levels to closely follow changes to mobility and online activity – increasing as restrictions are imposed and declining as they are relaxed. Using data for online crime and doorstep fraud, online sales, mobility data and an Autoregressive Conditional Hetroskedasticity (ARCH) statistical modelling framework, our findings provide striking evidence consistent with routine activity theory (Cohen & Felson, 1979), with oscillations in people’s day-to-day activities appearing to shape peaks and troughs in levels of crime committed online.
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