{"title":"The impact of the COVID-19, social distancing, and movement restrictions on crime in NSW, Australia.","authors":"Joanna J J Wang, Thomas Fung, Donald Weatherburn","doi":"10.1186/s40163-021-00160-x","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The spread of COVID-19 has prompted Governments around the world to impose draconian restrictions on business activity, public transport, and public freedom of movement. The effect of these restrictions appears to vary from country to country and, in some cases, from one area to another within a country. This paper examines the impact of the COVID-19 restrictions imposed in New South Wales (NSW) by the State Government. We examine week-to-week changes in 13 categories of crime (and four aggregated categories) from 2 January 2017 to 28 June 2020. Rather than using the pre-intervention data to make a forecast and then comparing that with what is actually observed, we use a Box-Jenkins (ARIMA) approach to model the entire time series. Our results are broadly in accord with those of other studies, but we find no effect of the lockdown (upward or downward) on domestic assault.</p><p><strong>Supplementary information: </strong>The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40163-021-00160-x.</p>","PeriodicalId":37844,"journal":{"name":"Crime Science","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1000,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8542413/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Crime Science","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1186/s40163-021-00160-x","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2021/10/24 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"CRIMINOLOGY & PENOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The spread of COVID-19 has prompted Governments around the world to impose draconian restrictions on business activity, public transport, and public freedom of movement. The effect of these restrictions appears to vary from country to country and, in some cases, from one area to another within a country. This paper examines the impact of the COVID-19 restrictions imposed in New South Wales (NSW) by the State Government. We examine week-to-week changes in 13 categories of crime (and four aggregated categories) from 2 January 2017 to 28 June 2020. Rather than using the pre-intervention data to make a forecast and then comparing that with what is actually observed, we use a Box-Jenkins (ARIMA) approach to model the entire time series. Our results are broadly in accord with those of other studies, but we find no effect of the lockdown (upward or downward) on domestic assault.
Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40163-021-00160-x.
期刊介绍:
Crime Science is an international, interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal with an applied focus. The journal''s main focus is on research articles and systematic reviews that reflect the growing cooperation among a variety of fields, including environmental criminology, economics, engineering, geography, public health, psychology, statistics and urban planning, on improving the detection, prevention and understanding of crime and disorder. Crime Science will publish theoretical articles that are relevant to the field, for example, approaches that integrate theories from different disciplines. The goal of the journal is to broaden the scientific base for the understanding, analysis and control of crime and disorder. It is aimed at researchers, practitioners and policy-makers with an interest in crime reduction. It will also publish short contributions on timely topics including crime patterns, technological advances for detection and prevention, and analytical techniques, and on the crime reduction applications of research from a wide range of fields. Crime Science publishes research articles, systematic reviews, short contributions and theoretical articles. While Crime Science uses the APA reference style, the journal welcomes submissions using alternative reference styles on a case-by-case basis.