A new toolkit for capturing how COVID-19 impacts crime
Tools grounded in resilience theory could help communities better prepare
for disasters

Date:
October 15, 2020
Source:
PLOS
Summary:
A new set of assessment tools shows promise in capturing how the
COVID-19 pandemic affects patterns of criminal activity.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
A new set of assessment tools shows promise in capturing how the
COVID-19 pandemic affects patterns of criminal activity. Herve' Borrion
of University College London, U.K., and colleagues present this toolkit
in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on October 14.


========================================================================== Previous research has demonstrated how crime patterns can be affected by regular seasonal factors, such as holidays and hours of darkness. However,
few studies have investigated how crime within a community responds to exceptional events that can significantly disrupt everyday life, such
as natural disasters, terrorist attacks, the Olympics, or the COVID-19 pandemic. Preliminary evidence has linked the pandemic to increased
rates of domestic violence and steep declines in other forms of crime.

To better understand how responses to the COVID 19 outbreak affected
crime patterns, Borrion and colleagues drew on resilience theory, which considers the ability of systems to adapt and survive in the face of perturbations. They used resilience theory as the basis for developing
a set of quantitative tools, including mathematical models, that can be
used to analyze how the pandemic impacts criminal activity within and
between cities.

To demonstrate these tools, the researchers applied them to daily
commercial theft data from a large, anonymous city in China that has
already resumed routine activities after undergoing a complete wave of COVID-19, using data obtained starting in September 2017 (prior to the outbreak) until April 29, 2020, when the city of the study had already
fully exited lockdown measures.

They found that commercial theft rates dropped by 64 percent over an
83-day period, before returning to rates that were higher than expected.

This case study shows how the new tools can be used to examine the
effects of COVID-19 and other disasters on crime. In particular, the
authors highlight the value of the "resilience indicators" they developed, which can capture how criminal activity recovers after a disturbance.

Other researchers could apply this toolkit to further investigate the
impact of COVID-19 on crime around the world. The resulting knowledge
could inform efforts to better anticipate and more effectively address
public safety needs in the face of disaster.

Dr Borrion notes: "Up until now, 'crime and disasters' was a tiny area in
crime science. With COVID, researchers have started to realize how much
there is to learn from disruptive events...For this work we've adopted
the perspective of offenders and examined how their business activities
have been disrupted by COVID stringencies." He adds: "China was the first country in the word where criminal activities that had been disrupted by
COVID stringencies have resumed to normal. The more we understand what
happened there, the better we can help police agencies across the world."

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by PLOS. Note: Content may be edited
for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Herve' Borrion, Justin Kurland, Nick Tilley, Peng Chen. Measuring
the
resilience of criminogenic ecosystems to global disruption:
A case-study of COVID-19 in China. PLOS ONE, 2020; 15 (10):
e0240077 DOI: 10.1371/ journal.pone.0240077 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201014141142.htm

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