COVID-19 and Social Distancing Measures in Queensland Australia Are Associated with Short-Term Decreases in Recorded Violent Crime

Jason Leslie Payne, Anthony Morgan and Alex R. Piquero
Additional contact information
Jason Leslie Payne: Australian National University

No z4m8t, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Since first diagnosed in late 2019, there have been more than 4 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than a quarter of a million deaths worldwide. Not since the Spanish Flu in 1918 has the world experienced such a widespread pandemic and this has motivated many countries across globe to take a series of unprecedented actions in an effort to curb the spread and impact of the virus through the adoption of unprecedented domestic and international travel restrictions as well as stay-at-home and social distancing regulations. Whether these policies have altered criminal activity is an important question. In this study, we examine officially recorded violent crime rates for the month of March and April, 2020, as reported for the state of Queensland, Australia. We use ARIMA modeling techniques to compute six-month-ahead forecasts of common assault, serious assault, sexual offense and domestic violence order breach rates and then compare these forecasts (and their 95\% confidence intervals) with the observed data for March and April 2020. We conclude that by the end of April, rates of common, serious and sexual assault had declined to their lowest level in a number of years, and for serious assault and sexual assault the decline was beyond statistical expectations. The rate at which domestic violence orders were breached in Queensland has remained unchanged throughout the first two months of the pandemic.

Date: 2020-05-13
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/5ebbe1160238a90073336a3a/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:z4m8t

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/z4m8t

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().