Heat stroke isn’t the only thing easily avoided by staying inside during the summer months. Violent crime rates spike over the summer across nation, and Baton Rouge is not excluded.
In 2010, hotter temperatures resulted in an increased amount of aggressive crime, particularly in domestic violence and non-aggravated assault categories, according to a study in 2010 study published in the journal “Weather, Climate and Society.”
While the Baton Rouge Police Department does not provide statistics on domestic violence crimes on their website, 44 percent of aggravated assaults occurred during the summer months, according to 2012 crime statistics.
From 2001 to 2010 was the hottest decade ever, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. With temperatures rising due to climate change, violent crime could continue to increase as people get more irritable the hotter it is.
A Ph.D. dissertation at Harvard written by Matthew Ranson attempted to show the effect that higher temperatures would have on violent crime rates across America.
In the abstract of the paper — called “Crime, Weather, and Climate Change” — Ranson states between 2010 and 2099, climate change will cause an additional 30,000 murders, 200,000 cases of rape, 1.4 million aggravated assaults, 2.2 million simple assaults and 400,000 robberies in the United States.
“In this paper, I document a robust statistical relationship between historical weather patterns and criminal activity and use this relationship to predict how changes in U.S. climate will affect future patterns of criminal behavior,” Ranson wrote. “The results suggest that climate change will have substantial effects on the prevalence of crime in the United States … the magnitude of the estimated impacts from this paper suggests that changes in crime are an important component of the broader impacts of climate change.”
Ranson is not the only researcher who has taken an interest in studying the relationship between crime and rising temperaturesm, as Iowa State University professor Craig Anderson published a similar paper in 2001.
In his paper “Heat and Violence,” Anderson states that 2.6 percent more murders and assaults occur in the U.S. in the summer than in the winter. He also said hot summers are typically more violent than cooler ones.
Of the 342 homicides in the Baton Rouge area since 2008, 52 percent of them occurred during the five month span between May and September.
LSU Police Department spokesman Capt. Cory Lalonde said during his law enforcement career he’s experienced the summer spike in crime at every stop in his career.
But the University campus is an exception to this trend.
“During the summer we can implement proactive measures to deter crime,” Lalonde said. “With less people on campus, we get less calls, so we can patrol more actively instead of reacting to calls.”