Case Closed: Curfews Don't Reduce Crime

Curfews, especially youth curfews for people under an arbitrary age limit, have long been a solution in search of a problem.  They have been touted as a panacea for all sorts of social ills, most notably street crime.  And the evidence for that has been very weak at best, with plenty of evidence against it in fact.

In fact, a 2016 literature review of 7000 studies finds that "juvenile curfews do not reduce crime or victimization".  Proponents of such illiberal policies can cherry-pick all they want, but the hard data are pretty damning against the idea of curfews.  As Ronald Reagan said, "facts are stubborn things".

But now we have the strongest "natural experiment" with the extreme, unprecedented, all-ages COVID lockdowns, curfews, and other restrictions in 2020 that did not exist in 2019 and prior years.  If curfews and similar policies actually reduced crime, we would have seen a sharp decrease in crime in 2020 relative to the average of previous years.  So what were the results of this yearlong natural experiment?

Well, you might wanna sit down before reading this.  Turns out, crime actually went way up in 2020 compared to the past few years, particularly homicides.  Data from the 2020 put the per capita homicide rate in the USA at a 23 year high (highest since 1997).  And of course, plenty of rioting as well.  Even mass shootings and hate crimes are up as well, and have persisted through both 2021 and 2022, well after such restrictions were finally lifted.

Even the supposedly good news about reported rapes being down in 2020 needs to be qualified.  Given how the vast majority of rapes occur behind closed doors and go unreported even in a normal year, the apparent decrease in 2020 may simply be an artifact of an increase in underreporting due to lockdown, especially since domestic violence and child abuse both appear to have increased significantly during lockdown.  The NCVS also shows a decrease in 2020 and 2021 as well, but given the secular downward trend since 1993, and the fact that survey data gathering may have been disrupted during the lockdowns, that needs to be qualified as well.

Reversion to the mean after the #MeToo movement crested and faded probably also played a role in the 2018 spike in self-reporting followed by an even larger crash.  The downward trend continued well after the lockdowns were over as well, so it is unlikely that the lockdowns actually reduced rape.

Back in April 2020, anecdotal evidence of course suggested that crime was down in some areas.  But clearly that decrease was short-lived, and then the opposite occurred.  Whether it is due to pent-up rage, restlessness, boredom, unemployment, fewer "eyes on the street", destruction of community, or all of the above, these sorts of authoritarian and illiberal policies clearly do more harm than good on balance.

So let this be the final nail in the coffin for lockdowns, curfews, and similar restrictions.  If curfews are to ever be used to fight crime and/or civil disorder, they need to be very limited, local, nuanced, and short-term--if they are to even be used at all.  And they certainly should NEVER be used to fight an airborne respiratory virus, as that is a major category error.

QED

P.S.  None of the above criticism of course precludes getting tough on REAL crime.  That is, any crimes that objectively harm the person or property of nonconsenting others.  That should really go without saying, but we will say it anyway.  "Catch and release" is every bit as dumb when it comes to real criminals as it is for fish, completely defeating the purpose.  Ditto for the equally boneheaded idea of "defund the police" as well.  Baby, meet bathwater.  Focused deterrence actually does work when done properly.