The title of this post is the title of this very interesting new empirical paper that I can across yesterday. The 13-page work is authored by Thomas Abt, Richard Rosenfeld and Ernesto Lopez. Here is its summary:
Did crime rates decline in response to the actions taken to address the COVID-19 pandemic? Several reports have suggested that they did, in the United States and other nations (e.g., Jacoby, Stucka, and Phillips 2020; Mohler, Bertozzi, Carter, et al. 2020; Police Executive Research Forum 2020; Semple and Ahmed 2020). Some cautioned that crime was not falling at the same pace everywhere, however, and in some US cities it was rising (Dolmetsch, Pettersson, Yasiejko 2020). These accounts are typically based on small samples of cities and brief time periods.
By contrast, the current study, to our knowledge the largest to date, compares monthly homicide rates in 64 US cities during January through June of 2020 with the previous three-year average homicide rates during the same months. We focus on homicide because it is the most serious and reliably measured criminal offense. We find that, compared with the previous three-year average, homicide rates decreased during April and May of 2020. Not all cities experienced a homicide decline, however, and the decreases during April were roughly twice as large as those in May. With few exceptions, we did not find sizable differences between the cities in which homicides dropped and those where they rose. We conclude by discussing several reasons why homicide rates in US cities might increase over the next several months.
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