The U-shaped crime recovery during COVID-19: evidence from national crime rates in Mexico

Abstract

The existing empirical evidence suggests a reduction in aggregate crime as a consequence of the COVID-19 lockdown. However, what happens when lockdown measures are relaxed? This paper considers how the COVID-19 pandemic affects crime rates throughout Mexico when the stay-at-home orders end. We use national crime data from Mexico’s National Public Security System, which reports municipality-level rates on assault & battery, theft & property crime, fraud, drug crimes & extortion, and homicides. Our results show that the majority of crimes follow a U-shaped trend—when the lockdown ends—crimes rise back to pre-pandemic levels.

Offline crime bounces back to pre-COVID levels, cyber stays high: Interrupted time-series analysis in Northern Ireland

“…Interestingly, while most forms of violent crime appeared to return to the same levels seen before the pandemic, drug trafficking not only bounced back to pre-COVID levels, but post-pandemic rates were well above those seen before the pandemic. Similar results were found in a study that analysed drug seizures over time in the United States (Palamar et al, 2021), and Langton et al (2021) observed a peak in drug crime in England and Wales in May 2020, though a similar increase in drug crime was not observed in other countries (Balmori de la Miyar et al, 2021). It is still unclear whether recorded drug trafficking increased as a result of growth in police activity, as drug trafficking could have become more visible with less people walking the streets, or whether this reflects actual changes in the supply and demand of drugs.…”

“…Langton et al (2021) showed that, after the first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK, crime started to bounce back to pre-COVID levels. Similar results were found by Balmori de la Miyar et al (2021) using data recorded in Mexico. Nix and Richards (2021) observed that domestic violence calls for police services in the US returned to pre-COVID levels when lockdown restrictions were lifted.…”

“…Simultaneously, others highlighted that some forms of cyber-enabled and cyberdependent crime had increased due the growth in internet use for work and leisure (Kemp et al, 2021;Lallie et al, 2021). After the first months of pandemic, some of the social distancing restrictions were relaxed and rates of offline crime began to bounce back to pre-COVID trends (Balmori de la Miyar et al, 2021;Langton et al, 2021), but there is a gap in research about the mid-term effect of multiple lockdowns on online crime, and few previous studies have compared online and offline crime using the same dataset. To fill these gaps, the present paper analysed crime data recorded in Northern Ireland between April 2015 and May 2021 to analyse the short-, mediumand potential long-term effects of each lockdown on various forms of offline and online crime.…”

“…Thus, we analyse a variety of crimes that could be affected in different ways by the mobility restrictions of the three lockdowns. For example, opportunities for violent offences and theft are found mostly in 'public places' and thus were likely to decrease during stay-at-home orders and return to normal levels after each lockdown (Balmori de la Miyar et al, 2021). While residential burglary opportunities were likely to decrease during lockdown due to the increase of 'capable guardians' at home, this may not be the case for non-residential burglaries (Felson et al, 2020).…”

“…After the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers noted that traditional, offline crime had begun to bounce back to pre-COVID levels (Balmori de la Miyar et al, 2021;Langton et al, 2021;Nix and Richards, 2021), and some violent offences even surpassed crime rates seen before the pandemic (Kim and Phillips, 2021). Nonetheless, there is a lack of research on the medium-and long-term impact of multiple lockdown orders on cyber-enabled and cyber-dependent crime.…”