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When Massholes go batty

Cambridge Police report that when a man felt he'd been cut off on Cambridge Street last night, he caught up to the other motorist and beat him with a baseball bat he happened to have handy. No word on the condition of the other motorist.

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Other research has found that hotter days, months and seasons produce higher-than-normal crime rates. The December 1997 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 73, No. 6, 1213?1223 reported on two studies that examined the relation between hotness of year and violent crime rate in the United States from 1950 to 1995. One study found that summer produced more violent crime?murders and assaults?than the other seasons. If high temperature was a direct cause of the summer effect, then years with more hot days (days in which the maximum temperature is at least 90F) would have somewhat larger increases in murder and assault than years with fewer hot days. This prediction was confirmed by the data.

A second study examined the relation between the average temperature for each year and the corresponding murder and assault rate for the same 46-year period. If hot temperatures have a direct effect on violent behavior, then hotter years should (on average) produce higher violent crime rates. This is exactly what happened. The combined murder-and-assault rate was consistently higher in hotter years than in cooler ones. These results occurred even when the data were statistically controlled for the poverty rate, age shifts in the U.S. population and the general upward drift of violent crime during the period.

Read the entire article here.

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By no means am I pouring cold water on that theory, I'm sure there is both correlation and causation between heat and road rage. That said, I would have expected confounding variables to wipe out that effect, down into the noise. Consider the example of feedback. At some point the majority of car drivers are going to opt for air conditioning?

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Oh, I'm sure there are some in there that sociologists would never think of. They did think of quite a few that are linked to calendar year and crime - such as age distributions. The long term nature of one of the studies would tend to render some confounders irrelevant (chronic cohort studies versus time series studies) - although I'm not much of a fan of generic trend line fitting, no matter how many df or how much data you have. Kind of a kludgy approximation of "bunch of stuff we don't know".

In any case, I popped it up to point out that there are some pretty good studies showing associations ... what is unclear is whether it is the heat itself, or the heat driving people out into the streets (although SES was controlled for)

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I don't doubt there's some correlation there. It's the main reason I don't like to compare the violent crime rates of Boston to that of New Orleans, Miami, Phoenix, etc. There's no winter down there. Ask any cop in Boston what months see the lowest crime rates. It ain't July and August.

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