The pandemic isn't changing crime like you'd expect

There is no single story about coronavirus and crime rates

A person wearing a mask.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock)

Whatever you expect the COVID-19 pandemic to do to crime rates, it's probably not doing that.

Well, not exactly. There's no single story of coronavirus and crime. Some types of crime are increasing during the pandemic, while other crime rates are falling. Crime is up in some places and down in others. It will be tempting, not least for me, to cherry-pick coronavirus-era data to "prove" how our justice system should or shouldn't change, yet as with so much of the pandemic information available to us, right now caution is more warranted than certainty.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.