Heat and Crime
Recently, I read about a phenomenon where people acted more violently and aggressively when the weather was hot. This phenomenon did not seem to be specific to actions wherein someone is hurt, but rather aggression in general. Whether this means all crime or crime of an interpersonal nature, I cannot say. One such article that I read can be found here. However, this begs the questions as to whether or not crime statistics reflect this trend. More specifically, are crimes against persons more common during the summer months, when it is expected to be warm, than they are during the winter months, where it is expected to be cold. In this post, I will explore the data surrounding crimes in the state of Colorado and determine which months see the most crimes against persons.
To answer my question, and therefore supplement current research, I obtained data surrounding crime statistics in Colorado that date back to 2008. Each entry in the data depicted the county in which the crime occurred, the year, the month, and the number of crimes of a particular category that occurred that month. Categories included crimes against persons, crimes against property, drug/narcotic tool crimes, and drug/narcotic crimes. For my interests, I only looked at the month and the number of crimes against persons. I decided that this category would most accurately reflect crimes aroused by aggression. In the other categories, such as crimes against property, it seems less likely to me that the source of the crime stems from pure aggression and other motivations might be prevalent. For example, one might steal a loaf of bread because they are hungry while someone else might start a bar fight because they are aggressive. In the end however, it is not unfair to surmise that heat plays a factor in many facets of human life.
In order to conduct my research, I loaded the data into Jupyter Notebooks as a .CSV file, did some Python coding, and got my results. This process was a frustrating one, as the data in the .CSV file were of the object type and I needed them to be in the float or integer type in order to properly code. To attempt to fix this, I called the data as a float type, but to no avail. In the end, I loaded the .CSV file into Google Sheets and exported it again as a .CSV file. After importing the data into Jupyter Notebooks once again, I was able to properly code with it. After this, I grouped the data by month and aggregated by summing the number of crimes against persons for every month of every year since 2008. This left me with the total number of crimes against persons for each month of the the 12-month year for the last 14 years. I then sorted the values from highest to lowest and was left with the results.
The month with the most crimes against persons was July, with 68,927. This was followed by August with 68,347, then September with 66,200, then May with 66,092, then June with 64,915, then October with 63,437, then January with 60,994, then April with 60,743, then March with 59,735, then November with 58,803, then December with 56,079, and finally February with 53,546.
While I performed this analysis with a number of assumptions, the most glaringly being that I assumed the Summer and Springs months to have hotter weather and the Winter and Fall months to have colder weather, I believe that this is indicative of a higher number of crimes against persons in months typically associated with hotter weather. The average number of crimes against persons committed in the Summer and Spring months is 65,870 and the average number for the Winter and Fall months is 58,765. This is a distinct difference that might indicate that heat does indeed play a role in aggression, or more accurately, crime comitance.
While my research is limited in that no statistical tests were conducted, so I cannot say if there is any statistically significant difference between the crimes counts of the different seasons, I can say that at face value, the hotter months do seem to have more crime than the colder months. It is for this reason that I conclude my analysis to be supplemental to current research surrounding the relationship between hotter weather and increased crime.
