Crime Frequency During COVID - 19 and Black Lives Matter Protests

Abstract

The COVID-19 disrupted the daily life of individuals within the United States and around the world when government restrictions were put into place. During the pandemic restrictions, social unrest took place after the death of George Floyd. Our objective is to study the crime rate during the pandemic and social unrest that took place after the death of George Floyd. We used data from four cities that were heavily affected with the pandemic and social unrest: Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. Holt-Winters and SARIMA models were used to see if there was any change of crime during the pandemic and social unrest in addition to before and after the social unrest. Los Angeles had the lowest crime frequency out of the four cities while Philadelphia had the highest. All Holt-Winters models and SARIMA models showed around January 2020, during when the first case of COVID-19 occurred, crime was the same for all four cities except for Philadelphia where crime had dropped for a particular time until it increased again. There was no clear evidence to suggest that crime was affected during the COVID-19 pandemic and the social unrest during the protests.