As global temperatures climb, warmer winters in parts of the country may set the scene for higher rates of violent crimes such as assault and robbery, according to a new CIRES study.
As global temperatures climb, warmer winters in parts of the country may set the scene for higher rates of violent crimes such as assault and robbery, according to a new CIRES study.
“During mild winters, more people are out and about, creating the key ingredient for interpersonal crimes: opportunity,” said Ryan Harp, a CIRES/CU Boulder Ph.D. student and lead author of the study published today in the AGU’s cross-disciplinary journal, GeoHealth.
In an innovative new assessment, Harp and his advisor, CIRES Fellow Kris Karnauskas, used powerful climate analysis techniques to investigate the relationship between year-to-year fluctuations in climate and violent crime rates in U.S. cities since 1979. Their methods accounted for the fact that crime rates have dropped significantly since the 1990s in most places. These long-term trends, driven by many societal factors, create the “baseline” for the new analysis. “Consequently, we considered the crime rate differences from that baseline,” said Karnauskas, who is also an Associate Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at CU Boulder.
He and Harp obtained monthly violent and property crime data for over 16,000 cities directly from the FBI, specifically the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. The database, which was snail-mailed to Karnauskas’ lab after only a few phone calls and extraction from tape drives at a FBI data center in West Virginia, included all types of violent crimes including murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft. The scientists relied on historical climate data from NOAA’s North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR).
Read more at University of Colorado at Boulder
Image: As global temperatures climb, warmer winters in parts of the country may set the scene for higher rates of violent crimes such as assault and robbery, according to a new CIRES study. (Credit: Tony Webster/Wikimedia Commons)
