Payne Jason L, Morgan Anthony, Piquero Alex R
University of Wollongong, Keiraville, Australia.
Australian Institute of Criminology, Canberra, Australia.
Crime Sci. 2021;10(1):7. doi: 10.1186/s40163-020-00136-3. Epub 2021 Mar 8.
Confronted by rapidly growing infection rates, hospitalizations and deaths, governments around the world have introduced stringent containment measures to help reduce the spread of COVID-19. This public health response has had an unprecedented impact on people's daily lives which, unsurprisingly, has also had widely observed implications in terms of crime and public safety. Drawing upon theories from environmental criminology, this study examines officially recorded property crime rates between March and June 2020 as reported for the state of Queensland, Australia. We use ARIMA modeling techniques to compute 6-month-ahead forecasts of property damage, shop theft, residential burglary, fraud, and motor vehicle theft rates and then compare these forecasts (and their 95% confidence intervals) with the observed data for March through to June. We conclude that, with the exception of fraud, all property offence categories declined significantly. For some offence types (shop stealing, other theft offences, and residential burglary), the decrease commenced as early as March. For other offence types, the decline was lagged and did not occur until April or May. Non-residential burglary was the only offence type to significantly increase, which it did in March, only to then decline significantly thereafter. These trends, while broadly consistent across the state's 77 local government areas still varied in meaningful ways and we discuss possible explanations and implications.
面对迅速增长的感染率、住院率和死亡率，世界各国政府纷纷出台严格的防控措施，以帮助减少新冠病毒的传播。这种公共卫生应对措施对人们的日常生活产生了前所未有的影响，不出所料，在犯罪和公共安全方面也产生了广泛的影响。本研究借鉴环境犯罪学理论，考察了澳大利亚昆士兰州2020年3月至6月官方记录的财产犯罪率。我们使用自回归积分移动平均（ARIMA）建模技术来计算财产损失、商店盗窃、住宅入室盗窃、欺诈和机动车盗窃率提前6个月的预测值，然后将这些预测值（及其95%置信区间）与3月至6月的观测数据进行比较。我们得出结论，除欺诈外，所有财产犯罪类别均显著下降。对于某些犯罪类型（商店盗窃、其他盗窃犯罪和住宅入室盗窃），下降早在3月就开始了。对于其他犯罪类型，下降滞后，直到4月或5月才出现。非住宅入室盗窃是唯一显著增加的犯罪类型，它在3月增加，之后才显著下降。这些趋势虽然在该州的77个地方政府区域大致一致，但仍存在有意义的差异，我们将讨论可能的解释和影响。
