Coronavirus: Locked down areas recorded 47.1% increase in crime rate – GSS

• Posted on October 1, 2020October 1, 2020
• by Nana Kwesi Coomson
• Comment

The coronavirus pandemic has since March undoubtedly had a devastating impact on households, businesses, and the local economies in Ghana, and the world at large.

With almost every sector experiencing change of a sort, the pandemic gave way to more negative effects than positive.

The most recent survey conducted by the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS), tagged the Local Economies Tracker, proved that the three-week partial lockdown in Accra and Kumasi during the early times of the pandemic paved way for more criminal activities to take place.

The report indicated that localities in locked down districts experienced the highest increase in overall crime rate and other forms of crime with a percentage of 47.1.

Overall, three out of ten communities, that is 34.1% of localities in the country saw an increase in crime during the lockdown period.

Theft and burglary were the two most common crimes, with 31.4% and 13.1% respectively. This was followed by an increase in domestic violence (3.7%) and assaults (3.1%) in communities.

Government Statistician, Prof Samuel Kobina Annim, throwing more light on the figures stated that, “Clearly, the evidence pointed to the fact that as a result of COVID-19, there was an upsurge in crime across all the three different districts. Specifically, if you put all these three districts together, at least a third of the localities in these districts indicate that there has been an increase in crime.”

“The district that suffered the most as a result of COVID-19 from the perspective of crime is locked down districts and if you cut down on all the components of crime, that is, theft, burglary, violence, assault and murder, we see that the locked down districts was the hardest hit. Specifically, we had close to 50% of localities in locked down districts indicating that. Of the different types of crime from theft to murder, theft was the highest across all the three districts.”

The COVID-19 Local Economies Tracker was conducted on a total of 2,770 localities in the country from May to June 2020.

The districts in the various regions were segmented into three domains; that is, the locked-down districts which include 40 districts, border districts made up of 47 districts, and other districts which do not fall into any of these categories.

-citi