The impact of the COVID-19, social distancing, and movement restrictions on crime in NSW, Australia

Joanna J. J. Wang; Thomas Fung; Donald Weatherburn

doi:10.1186/s40163-021-00160-x

The impact of the COVID-19, social distancing, and movement restrictions on crime in NSW, Australia

Joanna J. J. Wang^*, Thomas Fung, Donald Weatherburn

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

8 Citations (Scopus)

38 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The spread of COVID-19 has prompted Governments around the world to impose draconian restrictions on business activity, public transport, and public freedom of movement. The effect of these restrictions appears to vary from country to country and, in some cases, from one area to another within a country. This paper examines the impact of the COVID-19 restrictions imposed in New South Wales (NSW) by the State Government. We examine week-to-week changes in 13 categories of crime (and four aggregated categories) from 2 January 2017 to 28 June 2020. Rather than using the pre-intervention data to make a forecast and then comparing that with what is actually observed, we use a Box–Jenkins (ARIMA) approach to model the entire time series. Our results are broadly in accord with those of other studies, but we find no effect of the lockdown (upward or downward) on domestic assault.

Original language	English
Article number	24
Pages (from-to)	1-14
Number of pages	14
Journal	Crime Science
Volume	10
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1186/s40163-021-00160-x
Publication status	Published - 24 Oct 2021

Bibliographical note

Copyright the Author(s) 2021. Version archived for private and non-commercial use with the permission of the author/s and according to publisher conditions. For further rights please contact the publisher.

Keywords

COVID-19
Lockdown
Assault
Theft
Robbery
Criminal opportunity
Domestic violence

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10.1186/s40163-021-00160-xLicence: CC BY

Publisher version (open access)Final published version, 1.1 MBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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The impact of the COVID-19, social distancing, and movement restrictions on crime in NSW, Australia

Abstract

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Keywords

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