Suburban Arrests Surged After COVID, With Sharp Racial Disparities

When the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic in March 2020, criminologists braced for disruption. Lockdowns emptied streets, shuttered businesses, and rewrote the daily routines that shape when and where crime occurs. Early studies confirmed the expectation: property offenses such as burglary, theft, and robbery plummeted as potential targets vanished behind closed doors. Yet a new analysis of six years of arrest records from one American suburb suggests that the pandemic’s deepest effects on the criminal legal system arrived not during the emergency itself, but in the years that followed—and that those effects fell unevenly along lines of race and gender.

The study, published in the American Journal of Criminal Justice, examines arrest patterns in Irondequoit, a town of roughly 50,000 people bordering Rochester, New York, and Lake Ontario. Led by Oral Nicholas Robertson of Rochester Institute of Technology and Christopher R. Dennison of the University at Buffalo, the research team drew on detailed arrest records from the Irondequoit Police Department spanning 2018 through 2023, supplied by the Monroe Crime Analysis Center. That window captures two years before the pandemic, two years of lockdown and its immediate aftermath, and two years of recovery, offering an unusually clean before-during-after design for a single community.

Suburbs have long been a blind spot in crime research. Most scholarship on policing and criminal justice concentrates on central cities, where crime rates are higher and data are more readily available. But high-profile cases of police violence in suburban settings—including the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota—have underscored that questions about race and enforcement do not stop at city limits. Irondequoit, whose population is about 75 percent White, 7 percent Black, and 11 percent Hispanic according to U.S. Census estimates, is demographically similar to many American suburbs, making it a revealing case study of how a national crisis rippled through communities that researchers rarely examine.

The numbers tell a striking story. In 2018 and 2019, the town’s total arrest rate hovered around 8.6 arrests per 1,000 residents. It fell to roughly 6 per 1,000 by 2021, consistent with the nationwide suppression of street crime during lockdowns. Then came the reversal. By 2023, the overall arrest rate had tripled from its pandemic low to 20.88 per 1,000 residents—a level more than double the pre-pandemic baseline. The surge was driven overwhelmingly by non-violent offenses, which climbed from approximately 5 arrests per 1,000 people before the pandemic to about 19 per 1,000 by 2023.

Violent-crime arrests followed a different trajectory. During the pandemic years, the researchers observed an almost threefold increase in violent arrests even as non-violent arrests continued to decline, a pattern other scholars have linked to confinement at home, which heightened exposure to domestic-related incidents. Prior work by Jetelina and colleagues on domestic violence during the pandemic, and by Piquero and colleagues in Dallas, documented similar dynamics. After the acute phase of the pandemic, arrests for both violent and non-violent offenses rose in Irondequoit, though the non-violent category accounted for the bulk of the overall rebound.

The demographic breakdown is where the report becomes most unsettling. Before the pandemic, Black residents already had the highest arrest rate in the town, followed by Hispanic and then White residents—a familiar racial hierarchy in enforcement data. All groups saw declines from 2020 to 2021. But during the recovery, the disparities widened dramatically. By 2023, the arrest rate for Black residents reached nearly 104 per 1,000 individuals, an extraordinary figure that dwarfs the townwide average and represents a far steeper increase than any other group experienced. Supplemental analyses cited in the report indicate that the sharpest post-pandemic rise in non-violent arrests occurred among non-Hispanic Black men.

Gender patterns echoed the same asymmetry. Arrest rates for men and women both declined modestly from 2018 through 2021, but men’s arrests surged afterward, reaching about 37 per 1,000 people in 2023 compared with nearly 7 per 1,000 for women. Both groups ended the period at more than three times their 2021 levels, yet the absolute gap between them ballooned, reinforcing long-standing patterns in which system contact concentrates heavily among men.

The researchers interpret these patterns through the lens of social dislocation—the idea that crises produce normlessness, uncertainty, and strain that reshape both offending and enforcement. The pandemic disrupted labor markets, social norms, and daily routines on a scale rarely seen in modern American life, and research by Haug and colleagues showed how movement restrictions generated unintended stress on economies and societies. In such conditions, public fear of crime can intensify even when measured offending falls, and confidence in government’s capacity to maintain order can erode. Drawing on work by Reid and colleagues linking pandemic anxiety to public mistrust, the authors argue that communities under stress may demand more punitive responses to perceived disorder, particularly when that disorder is racially coded. Historic anxieties linking Blackness to criminality, documented by scholars such as Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Michelle Alexander, suggest that racial minorities may face intensified surveillance precisely when collective fear peaks.

The report also raises the possibility that the disparities reflect changes in policing itself. Officers, like residents, experienced heightened fear and uncertainty during the crisis, and may have responded to community anxieties with more discretionary or profilable enforcement, especially for the low-level, non-violent offenses that dominated the post-pandemic surge. Studies by Dunbar and Jones on race and pandemic-era policing, and by Kajeepeta and colleagues on racialized enforcement of COVID mandates in New York City, lend plausibility to that interpretation. The authors stop short of attributing causation, noting that the extent to which COVID magnified this historic injustice remains to be fully explored, but they urge future research to examine why the pandemic amplified the problem so sharply in this population.

Beyond its immediate findings, the study carries a warning about the future. In an era of globalization and climate change, pandemics and large-scale disasters are expected to become more frequent, and each crisis may intensify racialized fear of crime while straining the institutions responsible for a fair response. The authors also point toward the longer horizon: leading criminological theories hold that criminal propensity is rooted in childhood environments, and if the pandemic produced lasting increases in normlessness, strain, and financial insecurity among parents, those stressors may spill over into children’s well-being and, decades hence, into criminal careers. With the United States simultaneously confronting a mental health crisis and a substance use epidemic, the authors caution that the pandemic’s full societal costs may still be decades from being tallied. What a single suburb’s arrest ledger reveals, they suggest, is an early glimpse of how crises can quietly deepen the inequities embedded in the American criminal legal system.

Subject of Research: The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on arrest rates by race, ethnicity, gender, and crime type in a suburban community in the United States.

Article Title: Suburban Shifts in Arrest Rates: a Short Report on Trends Before, During, and After the Covid Pandemic

Article References: Robertson, O. N., Dennison, C. R., Adelman, R. M., Kalluri, M., Premanand, Y. S., Singh, A. A., Brass, M., & Ngwu, M. (2026). Suburban Shifts in Arrest Rates: a Short Report on Trends Before, During, and After the Covid Pandemic. American Journal of Criminal Justice. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-026-09951-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12103-026-09951-x

Keywords: COVID-19, arrest rates, suburban crime, racial disparities, policing, non-violent crime, violent crime, social dislocation, criminal justice, Irondequoit, gender, Rochester