Did the Colorado counties with the highest COVID rates see an increase in person-on-person crime from 2019 to 2020?
2020 was an extremely difficult year for many all across the world. Specifically, In Colorado, nine-thousand more people died in 2020 than the average of the previous five years. Move forward to 2023, COVID still remains a serious threat to public health and has garnered the bulk of our attention for the past few years. While I am not here to make light out of the devastation COVID has caused, my research has been aimed at finding the slight silver-linings that COVID has brought to my home state of Colorado. My data analysis has led me to the conclusion that COVID and the lockdowns of 2020, actually unified Coloradans.
I conducted a data analysis on the Colorado counties with the highest covid rates. This led me to an interesting discovery. I had expected larger counties such as Denver and El Paso, to have higher COVID cases per capita. I had this initial hypothesis because of the greater density of people in these larger counties. After conducting my analysis, I discovered that the Colorado counties most affected by COVID cases were smaller, more rural counties, mostly on the eastern and southern plains of our state. My analysis with python using the New York Times, county level COVID dataset revealed the Colorado counties with the highest COVID cases per capita in 2020. These counties are listed in order from highest to tenth highest rate per capita. Crowley County with 0.282 cases per capita. Bent County with 0.186 cases per capita. Logan County with 0.151 cases per capita. Lincoln County with 0.140 cases per capita. Fremont County with 0.095 cases per capita. Otero County with 0.087 cases per capita. Prowers County with 0.084 cases per capita. Pueblo County with 0.078 cases per capita. Adams County with 0.078 cases per capita. Finally, Morgan County with 0.073 cases per capita. I am not sure why these more rural counties were hit the hardest by COVID rates and believe this subject is still up for debate. I am not writing to debate this topic, but I do have some good news for the majority of these ten counties as we look back at the year 2020.
My belief before conducting my next part of this analysis was that counties most affected by COVID would also be affected by an increase in crime. I made this hypothesis by thinking about the negative effects that COVID had on jobs and the economy. I had guessed that these counties would see an increase in person-on-person crime from the year 2019 to 2020 because of increased unemployment and tough economic times brought on by COVID. My hypothesis could not have been more incorrect.
After analyzing the ten counties in Colorado with the highest COVID rates per capita, I was shocked by the results. I expected to see most of these counties (if not all of them) have an increase in crime from 2019 to 2020. The data I used for person-on-person crime in Colorado counties came from The Colorado Bureau of Investigation. I compared person-on-person crime for 2019 and 2020 from each of the ten counties listed above, that I identified as having the highest COVID rates per capita. I found that six out of the ten counties actually reduced the amount of person-on-person crime from 2019 to 2020. Crowley County reduced person-on person crime per capita from 0.299 in 2019 to 0.164 in 2020. Bent County reduced person-on person crime per capita from 2.036 in 2019 to 1.807 in 2020. Fremont County reduced person-on-person crime per capita from 1.554 in 2019 to 1.445 in 2020. Prowers County reduced person-on person crime per capita from 7.283 in 2019 to 4.086 in 2020. Pueblo County reduced person-on person crime per capita from 0.3053 in 2019 to 0.3050 in 2020. Morgan County reduced person-on person crime per capita from 1.017 in 2019 to 0.967 in 2020.
While I am not sure about the specific reasons and factors that go into this decrease in crime from 2019 to 2020. I am very surprised to see these numbers and hope this analysis can offer a small silver lining to these six communities who were ravaged by COVID in 2020.
