Somehow I always end up alone: COVID-19, social isolation and crime in Queensland, Australia
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rime Science Open Access
RESEARCH
Somehow I always end up alone: COVID‑19, social isolation and crime in Queensland, Australia Martin A. Andresen1* and Tarah Hodgkinson2
Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically affected social life. In efforts to reduce the spread of the virus, countries around the world implemented social restrictions, including social distancing, working from home, and the shuttering of numerous businesses. These social restrictions have also affected crime rates. In this study, we investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the frequency of offending (crimes include property, violent, mischief, and miscellaneous) in Queensland, Australia. In particular, we examine this impact across numerous settings, including rural, regional and urban. We measure these shifts across the restriction period, as well as the staged relaxation of these restrictions. In order to measure impact of this period we use structural break tests. In general, we find that criminal offences have significantly decreased during the initial lockdown, but as expected, increased once social restrictions were relaxed. These findings were consistent across Queensland’s districts, save for two areas. We discuss how these findings are important for criminal justice and social service practitioners when operating within an extraordinary event. Keywords: COVID-19, Crime, Queensland, Australia, Regional, Exceptional events Introduction With its origins in Wuhan, China in late 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has spread around the world (Readfern 2020). By the end of the first quarter of 2020, most nations had implemented social restrictions (social distancing, closing non-essential business, restricting local movement, etc.) in efforts to minimise the spread of the virus. Social interactions moved online, as did the economy, with the ways in which we interact changing radically, in many cases literally overnight. Aside from essential workers (health care providers, front-line officers, food services, etc.) and limited trips for groceries, medical concerns, and exercise, governments instructed residents to stay home. *Correspondence: [email protected] 1 School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University, Gold Coast Campus, Parklands Dr, Southport, QLD 4215, Australia Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
Exceptional events, such as the COVID-19 global pandemic, though catastrophic in a number of dimensions, provide opportunities for natural experiments. These natural experiments can then be used to test our theories of human behaviour that can then be used to (hopefully) improve societal responses to future exceptional events, planned or otherwise. COVID-19 is considered an exceptional event because it impacts social structures and collective behaviour (Barton 1969). The introduction of social restrictions related to COVID-19 radically impacted human movement patterns (Google 2020) with significant reductions in movement away from the home. Alongside these shifts in move
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