Disentangling community-level changes in crime trends during the COVID-19 pandemic in Chicago
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(2020) 9:21 Campedelli et al. Crime Sci https://doi.org/10.1186/s40163-020-00131-8
Open Access
RESEARCH
Disentangling community‑level changes in crime trends during the COVID‑19 pandemic in Chicago Gian Maria Campedelli1*, Serena Favarin2,3 , Alberto Aziani2,3 and Alex R. Piquero4,5
Abstract Recent studies exploiting city-level time series have shown that, around the world, several crimes declined after COVID-19 containment policies have been put in place. Using data at the community-level in Chicago, this work aims to advance our understanding on how public interventions affected criminal activities at a finer spatial scale. The analysis relies on a two-step methodology. First, it estimates the community-wise causal impact of social distancing and shelter-in-place policies adopted in Chicago via Structural Bayesian Time-Series across four crime categories (i.e., burglary, assault, narcotics-related offenses, and robbery). Once the models detected the direction, magnitude and significance of the trend changes, Firth’s Logistic Regression is used to investigate the factors associated to the statistically significant crime reduction found in the first step of the analyses. Statistical results first show that changes in crime trends differ across communities and crime types. This suggests that beyond the results of aggregate models lies a complex picture characterized by diverging patterns. Second, regression models provide mixed findings regarding the correlates associated with significant crime reduction: several relations have opposite directions across crimes with population being the only factor that is stably and positively associated with significant crime reduction. Keywords: Coronavirus, Structural Bayesian Time-Series, Communities, Sars-CoV-2, Pandemic, Crime trends Introduction The onset and spread of COVID-19 has affected nearly every continent and many millions of people. Not only has the virus infected, sickened, and killed scores of individuals as the virus moved from Asia, to Europe, to the US, and onwards to Central and South America, but it has also affected the lives of persons living in each of the countries that have experienced widespread infection. In particular, at the behest of public health officials, citizens of just about every country have been subject to social distancing measures, stay-at-home policies, shelter-inplace designations, and many were forced to remain in
*Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento, Trento, Italy Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
their homes for well over a month at a time in order to contain the spread of the virus. As a result of these policy prescriptions, a wide array of research questions can be considered. For present purposes, we focus on the extent to which various policies associated with containing the spread of COVID19 may have affected the frequency and patterning of criminal activity. Our interest in this space is not novel, as many
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