Highlights

Abstract

Keywords

JEL

۱٫ Introduction

۲٫ COVID-19 and crime

۳٫ Empirical strategy

۴٫ Results

۵٫ Discussion

۶٫ Conclusion

Declaration of Competing Interest

Appendix A. Appendix

References

Abstract

Objective
To investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on conventional crime and organized crime in Mexico City, Mexico.

Methods
Mexico City’s Attorney General’s Office reported crime data, covering domestic violence, burglary, robbery, vehicle theft, assault-battery, homicides, kidnapping, and extortion. We use an event study for the intertemporal variation across the 16 districts (municipalities) in Mexico City for 2019 and 2020.

Results
We find a sharp decrease on crimes related to domestic violence, burglary, and vehicle theft; a decrease during some weeks on crimes related to assault-battery and extortion, and no effects on crimes related to robbery, kidnapping, and homicides.

Conclusions
While our results show a decline in conventional crime during the COVID- 19 pandemic, organized crime remains steady. These findings have policy implications for catastrophic events around the world, as well as possible national security issues in Mexico.

۱٫ Introduction

After the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, governments around the world imposed a series of lockdowns. Non-essential businesses closed for several weeks, travel became difficult, social gatherings were limited, and officials from national and regional governments advised people to stay at home. All of these restrictions sought to accomplish social distancing, a vital public health tool used to contain the rapid growth of emerging infectious diseases (Fong et al., 2020). In essence, these stay-at-home orders modified most social structures, including criminal activity.

Until recently, research on the net effect of a large-scale lockdown on criminal activity was non-existent. New efforts within the criminal justice discipline are filling the knowledge gap. We aim to expand this literature by studying the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on crime in Mexico City, using records from Mexico City’s Attorney General’s Office. The particular context of Mexico offers a glimpse into the effects of a lockdown on crime in a developing economy that shares many characteristics with other countries in Latin America. In particular, Mexico has a significant presence of organized criminal enterprises —besides conventional criminals—and institutional weaknesses in the criminal justice system.

The stay-at-home order time-line in Mexico City was similar to the rest of the world. In December 2020, an epidemic of a new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, emerged in Wuhan, China. The virus spread quickly throughout Asia (e.g. Iran) and then Europe (e.g., Italy and Spain) during the first three months of 2020, and made its way to North America in February 2020. On March 11, 2020, COVID-19 became a pandemic, as pronounced by the World Health Organization (WHO). The following week, restaurants, gyms, clubs, and universities began to shut down voluntarily in Mexico City. On March 23, 2020, the federal government officially started the “social distancing” campaign, and the whole country went under lockdown. Schools, government offices, malls, parks, and non-essential businesses closed temporarily down in Mexico City.