COVID-19 and Violent Crime: A comparison of recorded offence rates and dynamic forecasts (ARIMA) for March 2020 in Queensland, Australia

Abstract

At the time of writing, there was 2.9 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than 200,000 deaths worldwide. Not since the Spanish Flu in 1918 has the world experienced such a widespread pandemic and this has motivated many countries across globe to take a series of unprecedented actions in an effort to curb the spread and impact of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Among these government and regulatory interventions includes unprecedented domestic and international travel restrictions as well as a raft of stay-at-home and social distancing regulations. Each has left criminologists wondering what impact this will have on crime in both the short- and long-term. In this study, we examine officially recorded violent crime rates for the month of March, 2020, as reported for the state of Queensland, Australia. We use ARIMA modeling techniques to compute six-month-ahead forecasts of common assault, serious assault, sexual offence and domestic violence order breach rates and then compare these forecasts (and their 95\% confidence intervals) with the observed data for March 2020. We conclude that the observed rates of reported violent offending across Queensland were not--at least not so far--significantly different from what was expected given the history of each offence series.