Coronavirus And Crime

        Is the Coronavirus decreasing Crime rate?

covid-19

     No, according to the pandemic situation.

Police and security personnel around the world done protective gear to perform their regular duties as well as enforce measures to combat the coronavirus pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted crime and illicit economies such as organized crime, terrorism, street crime, online crime, illegal markets and smuggling, human and wildlife trafficking, slavery, robberies and burglaries.

        Terrorist Attacks

In its magazine Al-Naba, ISIL recommended that its members exploit the pandemic in order to carry out terrorist attacks. Some extremists regard the virus as being divine punishment for human sins, both in the West and in Muslim countries. The International Crisis Group said that the pandemic would harm international counterterrorism efforts.

In April in India, an advisory was circulated among Delhi police staff of a potential ISIL attack on police personnel in the field, in the form of a lone wolf attack or "stabbing, firing or hitting by vehicles". Between January and May 2020, Indian security forces conducted 27 counterterrorism operations in Jammu and Kashmir in which more than 64 terrorists were killed. Out of these, at least 18 were killed during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in India. In the first week of May, five Indian Army special forces para commandos were killed by terrorists. Riyaz Naikoo, a commander of the terrorist organization Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, in his last audio message in April 2020, told his followers to follow health safety guidelines that health experts were sharing during the COVID-19 pandemic. He was killed shortly after.

Also in May a series of attacks in Afghanistan resulted in the deaths of 56 people. The targets included a hospital's maternity ward and a funeral, resulting in the deaths of babies, hospital staff, and people at the funeral.

        Cybercrime

With more people spending more time online, cyber crime has increased. With work from home increasing, more and more corporate data is being accessed from homes that may not have the same level of security as office systems. The World Health Organization published a cyber security notice warning people of fraudsters imitating WHO employees.

At least one seller on the dark web was attempting to sell coronavirus-infected blood that the seller had claimed had been injected into bats after it was extracted from his hospitalized father. It was unclear at the time of the article whether the seller was attempting a scam or was actually selling the blood. Another cyber fraud in America resulted in money that was meant for the unemployed being redirected to fraudulent accounts. The scale of it involves millions of dollars and it appears that the cyber-criminals are Nigerian.

        Domestic violence

Los Angeles reported a 23% decrease in crime in March 2020 compared to a year prior. Every category of crime in the city, including reported domestic violence and excepting auto theft, saw a decrease. Amid the reported global increase in domestic violence during the coronavirus pandemic, the United Nations called for a domestic violence "ceasefire".

        Hate crimes

An intelligence report compiled by the FBI's Houston branch warned against the likely increase of hate crime incidents against Asian Americans, based on the assumption that a portion of the US public associate the pandemic with China and Asian American populations. They also referenced multiple incidents of hate crimes already perpetrated across the country such as three Asian American family members stabbed by an individual who claimed that the family was Chinese and spreading the virus.