The countervailing impacts of significant 2020 events on youth delinquency

Abstract

We test hypotheses that three significant events in the year 2020 impacted U.S. youths’ involvement in crime: (H1) less delinquency due to the coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) pandemic and associated constraints to youths’ routine activities and substance use; (H2) more delinquency due to the police killing of George Floyd and ensuing social unrest, particularly among Black youth from communities disproportionately affected by police violence; and (H3) more delinquency due to growing political disaffection, especially among White youth from areas where people were most dissatisfied with the presidential election. To test the countervailing impacts of these significant events on youth delinquency, we combined individual-level data on crime, routine activities, and political disaffection from a large sample of 12th-grade youth (n = 3648) collected in the Monitoring the Future (MTF) study, with community-level data on school closures, constraints to geographic mobility and social interaction, police killings of civilians, election-related protests, and perceptions of election fairness. Overall, delinquency declined by 29% from 2019 to 2021 in part because youth less often engaged in unstructured activities and less frequently used alcohol and other drugs. Youth crime, however, did not decline in communities with high levels of police violence.