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

At the time of writing, there was 3.4 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than 300,000 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 unprecedented actions in an effort to curb the spread and impact of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Among these government and regulatory interventions includes stringent domestic and international travel restrictions as well as a raft of stay-at-home and social distancing regulations. The scale of these containment measures 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 property crime rates for March, 2020, as reported for the state of Queensland, Australia. We use ARIMA modeling techniques to compute six-month-ahead forecasts of property damage, shop theft, other theft, burglary, fraud, and motor vehicle theft 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 property offending across Queensland were significantly lower than expected for shop theft, other theft and credit-card fraud but statistically unchanged for property damage, burglary, and motor-vehicle theft.