Changes in Crime Rates During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

We estimate changes in the rates of five FBI Part 1 crime (homicide, auto theft, burglary, robbery, and larceny) during the COVID-19 pandemic from March through December 2020. Using publicly available weekly crime count data from 29 of the 70 largest cities in the U.S. from January 2018 through December 2020, three different linear regression model specifications are used to detect changes. One detects whether crime trends in four 2020 pre- and post-pandemic periods differ from those in 2018 and 2019. A second looks in more detail at the spring 2020 lockdowns to detect whether crime trends changed over successive biweekly periods into the lockdown. The third uses a city-level openness index that we created for the purpose of examining whether the degree of openness was associated with changing crime rates. For homicide and auto theft, we find significant increases during all or most of the pandemic. By contrast, we find significant declines in robbery and larceny during all or part of the pandemic and no significant changes in burglary over the course of the pandemic. Only larceny rates fluctuated with the degree of each city's lockdown. It is unusual for crime rates to move in different directions, and the reasons for the mixed findings for these five Part 1 Index crimes, one with no change, two with sustained increases, and two with sustained decreases, are not yet known. We hypothesize that the reasons may be related to changes in opportunity, and the pandemic provides unique opportunities for future research to better understand the forces impacting crime rates. In the absence of a clear understanding of the mechanisms by which the pandemic affected crime, in the spirit of evidence-based crime policy, we caution against advancing policy at this time based on lessons learned from the pandemic "natural experiment."