Has there been a spatial reordering of crime in the post-pandemic era? A case study from Greater Manchester

• In Event: WG-PLACE 2: Research on crime, place and time

Abstract

As society returned to (a ‘new’) normal following the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns in the UK, so too did the volume of crime return to pre-pandemic levels. To date, most research exploring the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on crime has focused on describing and accounting for this temporal trend. Far less attention has been paid to the question of whether the geographic distribution of crime has returned to pre-pandemic patterns. This paper seeks to address this shortfall and question whether the post-pandemic geographical pattering of crime has served to reshape inequalities in the exposure to crime at the neighbourhood level. We utilise spatially fine-grained police recorded crime data from 2018 to 2022, across several offence categories, to explore this issue via case study of Greater Manchester, a city-region in the North West of England. Both spatial analyses and multi-level models are deployed to investigate the existence of changes in the spatial patterning of crime between the pre-, during and post- pandemic periods, and the underlying socio-economic characteristics of neighbourhoods (from Census 2021) associated with these changes. This enables us to identify the (specific types of) neighbourhoods that have benefitted or lost out in the new spatial ordering of crime.

Authors

• Mark Ellison, Manchester Metropolitan University

• Jon Bannister, Manchester Metropolitan University

• Monsuru Adepeju, Manchester Metropolitan University, M15 6BH, United Kingdom

• Karolina Krzemieniewska-Nandwani, Manchester Metropolitan University