Criminal Justice Faculty Publications and Presentations

A Socio-Ecological Examination of Crime in an Urban Context During the Early Pandemic

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-25-2025

Abstract

Many urban areas in the United States saw increased crime during the COVID-19 pandemic. City leaders and criminal justice scholars have shown interest in exploring the connections between the pandemic and crime rates, seeking to identify potential preventive strategies for the future. Toward having such insight, this study examined crimes and signs of disorder during the strictest lockdown year of 2020 in the United States’s most diverse and fourth-largest city, Houston. It focused on certain neighborhood characteristics that are indicative of social disorganization and how such characteristics were predictive of changes in crime and disorder; the extent to which guardianship, which is inherent in routine activity theory, was predictive of crime and disorder and to what extent different segments of the population experienced crime and disorder early in the pandemic? Using Houston Police Department’s publicly available crime statistics and comparison data from other public community profile sources Negative Binomial Models were run and the data were further examined via geographic information systems mapping. The findings suggest situational crime prevention strategies may be effective. Specifically, prevention policies should include a) an understanding of the lives and motivations of those most likely to be perpetrators and, or victims of crimes and b) an understanding of the ecological dynamics that are likely to bring perpetrators into the realm of opportunities for crime that they are likely to exploit.

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Publication Title

Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice Studies

DOI

10.47509/JCCJS.2025.v03i01.05

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