Abstract :

Crime and violence remain persistent structural challenges in Guyana, with important implications for governance, public safety, and socioeconomic development. This study examines long-term serious crime dynamics in Guyana from 1990 to 2025 using a quantitative longitudinal design. The analysis integrates descriptive statistics, trend regression, structural break analysis (Bai–Perron), and category-level decomposition to assess overall crime trends, differences across offence types, and the relative contribution of each crime category to aggregate crime patterns. Data were obtained from the Guyana Bureau of Statistics and include major offence categories such as murder, manslaughter, rape, wounding, burglary, larceny, arson, and other offences. The results indicate that total serious crime does not follow a statistically significant linear trend over time, but instead exhibits pronounced temporal fluctuations and distinct structural shifts around 1994, 2012, and 2017. Property-related offences dominate the crime structure, accounting for 86.92% of total recorded crime, compared with 11.66% for violent crime and 1.41% for other offences. Burglary and larceny emerge as the primary drivers of aggregate crime variation, while violent offences such as murder and manslaughter remain comparatively stable over time. Structural break analysis further reveals that different crime categories experience shifts at different points in time, reflecting heterogeneous underlying dynamics. Overall, the findings show that changes in total crime are largely driven by property-related offences rather than uniform changes across all crime types, highlighting the importance of category-specific analysis in understanding long-term crime patterns in Guyana.

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Keywords :

crime dynamics., Guyana, longitudinal analysis, Serious crime, structural breaks, violent crime

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