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Special collection on "Covid-19 and Crime: consequences for incidence, public safety, security, and prevention"

The Covid-19 pandemic has been imposing unprecedented global restrictions on everyday life routines, affecting behaviour on a global scale. This special collection of articles will focus on the pandemic’s potential consequences on crime, including incidence, public safety, security, prevention.

The editors of Crime Science welcome submissions on this topic. The collection’s scope could include, but is not limited to:

  • Arguments concerning predicted changes using theoretical frameworks such as opportunity theories of crime. 
  • Early empirical studies of the relationship between lockdown practices and different types of crime.
  • Comparison papers looking at the trends in various settings and places and possible moderating factors for differences.
  • Research looking at the consequences of the pandemic on crime prevention practitioners— for example, the activities and resourcing of the police or security services.
  • Research looking at the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on the public, in terms of their feelings of safety and/or their crime prevention behaviours. 
  • Longer-term research tracking the crime consequences of the pandemic over time.

To ensure your paper is considered for this collection, please answer "yes" when asked whether you are planning to submit to a special collection, and select “Covid-19 and Crime” from the drop-down menu.  In addition, indicate within your cover letter that you wish your manuscript to be considered as part of this collection. 




  1. This study of recorded crime trends in England & Wales spans three and a half years, that is, two covid pandemic years from March 2020  and 18 ‘post-pandemic’ months following cessation of covid restrictions...

    Authors: Hulya Seyidoglu, Graham Farrell, Anthony Dixon, Jose Pina-Sánchez and Nick Malleson
    Citation: Crime Science 2024 13:6
  2. Research on pandemic domestic abuse trends has produced inconsistent findings reflecting differences in definitions, data and method. This study analyses 43,488 domestic abuse crimes recorded by a UK police fo...

    Authors: Sarah Hodgkinson, Anthony Dixon, Eric Halford and Graham Farrell
    Citation: Crime Science 2023 12:12
  3. Restrictions resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted people’s daily routine activities. Rooted in crime pattern and routine activity theories, this study tests whether the enactment of a Safer-at-Home...

    Authors: Theodore S. Lentz, Rebecca Headley Konkel, Hailey Gallagher and Dominick Ratkowski
    Citation: Crime Science 2022 11:12
  4. Illegal dumping of household and business waste, known as fly-tipping in the UK, is a significant environmental crime. News agencies reported major increases early in the COVID-19 pandemic when waste disposal ...

    Authors: Anthony C. Dixon, Graham Farrell and Nick Tilley
    Citation: Crime Science 2022 11:8
  5. Much research has shown that the first lockdowns imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic were associated with changes in routine activities and, therefore, changes in crime. While several types of violent...

    Authors: David Buil-Gil, Yongyu Zeng and Steven Kemp
    Citation: Crime Science 2021 10:26

    The Correction to this article has been published in Crime Science 2022 11:11

  6. COVID-19 impacts the daily lives of millions of people. This radical change in our daily activities affected many aspects of life, but acted as well as a natural experiment for research into the spatial distri...

    Authors: Maite Dewinter, Christophe Vandeviver, Philipp M. Dau, Tom Vander Beken and Frank Witlox
    Citation: Crime Science 2021 10:20
  7. Despite the immense impact of wildlife trafficking, comparisons of the profits, costs, and seriousness of crime consistently rank wildlife trafficking lower relative to human trafficking, drug trafficking and ...

    Authors: J. Sean Doody, Joan A. Reid, Klejdis Bilali, Jennifer Diaz and Nichole Mattheus
    Citation: Crime Science 2021 10:19
  8. The existing empirical evidence suggests a reduction in aggregate crime as a consequence of the COVID-19 lockdown. However, what happens when lockdown measures are relaxed? This paper considers how the COVID-1...

    Authors: Jose Roberto Balmori de la Miyar, Lauren Hoehn-Velasco and Adan Silverio-Murillo
    Citation: Crime Science 2021 10:14
  9. Governments around the world have enforced strict guidelines on social interaction and mobility to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Evidence has begun to emerge which suggests that such dramatic chang...

    Authors: Samuel Langton, Anthony Dixon and Graham Farrell
    Citation: Crime Science 2021 10:6
  10. Worry about COVID-19 is a central topic of research into the social and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we present a new way of measuring worry about catching COVID-19 that disti...

    Authors: Reka Solymosi, Jonathan Jackson, Krisztián Pósch, Julia A. Yesberg, Ben Bradford and Arabella Kyprianides
    Citation: Crime Science 2021 10:4
  11. Recent studies exploiting city-level time series have shown that, around the world, several crimes declined after COVID-19 containment policies have been put in place. Using data at the community-level in Chic...

    Authors: Gian Maria Campedelli, Serena Favarin, Alberto Aziani and Alex R. Piquero
    Citation: Crime Science 2020 9:21
  12. Crisis and disruption are often unpredictable and can create opportunities for crime. During such times, policing may also need to meet additional challenges to handle the disruption. The use of social media b...

    Authors: Manja Nikolovska, Shane D. Johnson and Paul Ekblom
    Citation: Crime Science 2020 9:20
  13. The covid-19 disease has a large impact on life across the globe, and this could potentially include impacts on crime. The present study describes how crime has changed in Sweden during ten weeks after the gov...

    Authors: Manne Gerell, Johan Kardell and Johanna Kindgren
    Citation: Crime Science 2020 9:19