Crime under Lockdown: The Impact of COVID-19 on Citizen Security in the City of Buenos Aires

Santiago Perez-Vincent, Ernesto Schargrodsky and Mauricio García Mejía

No 11423, IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank

Abstract: This paper studies the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown on criminal activity in the City of Buenos Aires, Argentina. We find a large, significant, robust, and immediate decline in crime following quarantine restrictions. We observe the effect on property crime reported to official agencies, police arrests, and crime reported in victimization surveys, but not in homicides. The decrease in criminal activity was greater in business and transportation areas, but still large in commercial and residential areas (including informal settlements). After the sharp and immediate fall, crime recovered but, as of November 2020, it did not reach its initial levels. The arrest data additionally allow us to measure the distance from the detainees address to the crime location. Crime became more local as mobility was restricted.

Keywords: Crime; Citizen security; Argentina; COVID-19; lockdown; COVID-19; COVID-19; COVID-19; COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J18 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english ... -of-Buenos-Aires.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

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:idb:brikps:11423

DOI: 10.18235/0003431

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Felipe Herrera Library ().