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.

Illegal waste fly-tipping in the Covid-19 pandemic: enhanced compliance, temporal displacement, and urban–rural variation

“…Other things equal, if everyone adhered to stay-at-home rules, then fly-tipping would decline. Of course, the illegal nature of fly-tipping could suggest that offenders might ignore stay-at-home rules, and while the highly novel pandemic situation makes this uncertain, it is clear that there were significant numbers of breaches of lockdown rules (Halford et al, 2022 ). This raises the issue of the different populations of potential offenders: might people who previously did not fly-tip begin fly-tipping in the pandemic?…”

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 antisocial 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.…”