Urban Resilience Against Crimes Upon Pandemic

Since early 2020, urban areas across the world had been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, when social distancing and lockdowns measures had been widely deployed to restrict citizens’ mobility, which induced dramatic changes on urban crimes and delinquency among cities. Drawing on crime data of London and New York in 2019, 2020 and 2021, this study attempts the two-year “look back” on the impact of massive lockdowns on crime trends and corresponding resilience, to evaluate the crime “vulnerability” and “recovery” capability against pandemic incurred lockdowns. In the assistance of criminological theories, routine activity, and general strain; and cutting-edge machine learning techniques on relating the community-level “preparedness” on geodemographics, socio-economic profiles (SES indicators) and “recovery” indicator for mobility changes, this research had proposed PROP-C model to evaluate urban crime resilience capability in comparing the crime changes pre-para the lockdown (2019 vs. 2020) and para-post lockdown (2020 vs.2021). The research findings suggest a general crime reduction upon mobility changes during lockdowns in 2020 among the metropolitan cities, but sharp “recovery” in 2021 since the measures had been lifted with regional resilience features. In general, the holistic mobility change had been found the most crime-influential factor rather than any fine-scaled SES characteristics, echoing with the commonly off-site criminal behaviors rather than committing crimes locally; the data-driven evidence could be further utilized for city-wide crime prediction and prevention strategies towards a promising post-pandemic recovery.