In a world called catastrophe: the impact of COVID-19 on neighbourhood level crime in Vancouver, Canada

Abstract

Objectives To test for statistically significant change in crime rates across neighbourhoods in Vancouver, Canada, resulting from social restrictions within the natural experiment of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods Differential local Moran’s I is used to identify statistically significant change in crime patterns across Vancouver’s neighbourhoods because of COVID-19. These changes are analysed with variables from social disorganization theory constructs using ANOVA. Results At the neighbourhood level, all crime types have significant change during COVID, but not always at the city level. Different neighbourhoods have different changes in crime despite these changes appearing to be constant at the city level; local effects asre important to consider. Variables representing the constructs of social disorganization theory are able to predict these changes. Conclusions COVID-19 has changed the patterns of crime in Vancouver, but most often in theoretically expected ways. Local changes are critical to understand crime during a pandemic.

Applying Dynamic Human Activity to Disentangle Property Crime Patterns in London during the Pandemic: An Empirical Analysis Using Geo-Tagged Big Data

“…For example, they specifically reflect Estévez-Soto's [13] findings for non-violent robbery, Halford et al's [14] findings for shoplifting, and Chen et al's [24] findings for theft. The results also demonstrated that, particularly in some contexts, social disorganisation variables made explanatory contributions to variations in crime across the COVID-19 period, in keeping with the findings of Andresen and Hodgkinson [36].…”

“…To date, like the aforementioned research on exploring explanatory/predictors in crime variations during the pandemic, limited COVID-19 and crime research have utilised SDT-related characteristics. The exceptions are Andresen and Hodgkinson [36] and Hodgkinson et al [37]. The former identified that certain property crime drops (theft of/from vehicles) and assault increases were connected with social-disorganisation-based socioeconomic conditions in neighbourhoods in a case study from Vancouver, Canada.…”

COVID-19, new challenges to human safety: a global review

“…Sweden, significant falls in total, assault, pickpocketing and burglary, but no change in drug offenses ( 91 ). In Canada, all types of crime changed significantly during the pandemic compared to metropolitan areas, with increased crime rates varying across neighborhoods ( 92 ). In England and Wales, researchers found that crime in most small areas remained stable throughout the epidemic ( 38 ).…”

Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on youth delinquency: A discontinuous growth analysis

“…A growing number of studies have examined the extent to which various structural characteristics contribute to the change of different crime types following the implementation of containment measures (Campedelli et al, 2020;McCarthy et al, 2021;Andresen and Hodgkinson, 2022;Hodgkinson et al, 2022). In general, prior research suggests that the impact of a specific contextual feature on the change of offending depends on offending types.…”

“…Third, despite the recognition of the heterogeneity of the relationship between COVID-19 and offending across communities (Campedelli et al, 2020;McCarthy et al, 2021;Andresen and Hodgkinson, 2022;Hodgkinson et al, 2022), contextual factors associated with such variation are understudied. This is because the units of analyses in existing research have overwhelmingly been cities (e.g., Mohler et al, 2020;Nivette et al, 2021) or countries (e.g., Gerell et al, 2020;Halford et al, 2020).…”