Joel Carr1, Joanna Clifton-Sprigg, Jonathan James, Suncica Vujic
1University of Antwerp, Antwerpen, Belgium
Introduction:
From the Black Death to the more recent Spanish flu or Ebola, pandemics have brought forth not only disease but also violence and animus toward minorities. We provide evidence of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on racial hate crime in England and Wales including temporal changes and the effect of policies and announcements.
Methods:
We use unique hate crime data collected through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests from UK police forces. A difference-in-difference approach is employed, controlling for mechanical changes in mobility using other non-racial hate crime biases. To test mechanisms we include data on policies, mobility, and tweets by keyword. The effect of announcements and policy changes is estimated using a regression discontinuity design.
Results:
Racial hate crime against East Asians increased by 60-80 percent, beginning in late January and persisted until November 2020. This effect was greatest in weeks leading up to the first national lockdown in the UK. The shock was then lower during lockdown, before increasing again in the summer. We present evidence that hate crime increased as COVID-19 cases in China increased and following announcements from the government signalling that China posed a public health risk to the UK. This indicates that protectionism played an important role in the observed hate crime spike. The hate crime shock was positively correlated with the salience of the lockdown and government policies restricting certain freedoms.
Conclusion:
The results suggest that the threat of lockdown and the experience of lockdown increase hate crime victimisation. Hate crimes increased first due to protectionism and concerns of a lockdown. They then continued to increase against East Asians during lockdown or the first wave; this was due to retaliation. Therefore lockdown had opposing effects on hate crime, by contemporaneously reducing mobility and interactions and increasing incentives to commit retaliatory hate crime.
Biography:
Joel Carr is a PhD student in Applied Economics and researcher at the University of Antwerp since 2018. Joel’s research expertise and dissertation focus on the impact of significant social events on the expression of prejudice, such as hate crimes, discrimination, etc. In addition, he researches the relationship between economics and crime, particularly the effect of labor market policies on criminal activity.