The association between mobility and crime in England and Wales

PurposeThis study provides the first national-level longitudinal analysis directly linking mobility data to policerecorded crime across local authorities in England and Wales, while controlling for stable structural differences between places.Its purpose is to examine how changes in human mobility are associated with changes in crime, taking advantage of the disruption in mobility caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. MethodsNegative binomial regression models were applied across 328 local authorities from March 2020 to October 2022, with area fixed effects, to assess how mobility across different activity spaces relates to police-recorded crime while accounting for unobserved, time-invariant local characteristics. Results