Has there been a spatial reordering of crime in the post-pandemic era?

• In Event: WG-PLACE 6: Neighbourhoods and Crime

Abstract

As society returned to normal following the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, 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. Less attention has been paid to whether the geographic distribution of crime at the neighbourhood level has returned to pre-pandemic patterns. This paper seeks to question whether the post-pandemic geographical pattering of crime has served to reshape inequalities in the exposure to crime at the neighbourhood level. This paper utilises spatially fine-grained police recorded crime data from 2018 to 2023, across several offence categories, to explore this issue via a series of case studies. 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 associated with these changes. This enables us to identify the types of neighbourhoods that have benefitted or lost out in the spatial ordering of crime.

Author

• Mark Ellison, Manchester Metropolitan University