Abstract

The literature evaluating the empirical association between stay-at-home policies and crime during the COVID-19 pandemic has concentrated on the effects within cities or regions, lacking a cross-national comparative approach. The focus has been on assessing the overall effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on crime, which involves evaluating changes associated with different stay-at-home government policies and voluntary responses by individuals and organizations that are only partially related to government policies. As a result, this literature has not identified heterogeneous effects of different levels of mobility restrictions across cities. To address these limitations, we extended the dataset of Nivette et al. (2021a) from 27 to 45 cities in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Oceania and applied a generalized synthetic control approach to identify the causal effect of strict lockdown restrictions on crime. We find that cities under strict lockdown experienced larger declines only in some property crimes (i.e., robbery, burglary, and vehicle theft) relative to cities under less stringent stay-at-home policies. No significant effects were found in assault, theft, and homicide. The decline in crime rates attributed to more stringent policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic represents only a small proportion of the effects documented in the literature. Lessons can be extracted regarding the necessity of implementing the most stringent measures on citizens’ freedoms and rights to reduce crime.