Minor covid-19 association with crime in Sweden, a ten week follow up

The covid-19 disease has a large impact on life across the globe, and this could potentially include impacts on crime. The present short report describes how crime has changed in Sweden during ten weeks after the government started to implement interventions to reduce spread of the disease. The first major interventions in Sweden were implemented in the end of week 11 in the year 2020, and we analyze police reported crimes through week 21. Descriptive statistics are provided relative to expected levels with 95 % confidence intervals for eight crime types. We find that total crime, assaults, pickpocketing and burglary have decreased significantly, personal robberies and narcotics crime are unchanged. Vandalism possibly increased somewhat but is hard to draw any firm conclusions on. The reductions are fairly small for most crime types, in the 5-20 % range, with pickpocketing being the biggest exception noting a 59 % drop relative to expected levels.