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NYT: Murder rates rise in a 25% of the nations 100 largest cities
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http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hot-and-bothered-experts-say-violent-crime-rises-with-the-heat/
http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/20...am_sales_rise_homicides_rise_coincidence.html
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/10/are-heatwaves-hotbed-for-crime
It's a real thing.
edit: beaten by 2 minutes.
timetokill
Banned
The sun can make you kill an Arab, dude
Spoiled Milk
Banned
This post makes me happy.
Obviously more crime happens when people spend more time outside. That hardly explains the increase in Baltimore's homicide rate.
Pancake Mix
Copied someone else's pancake recipe
Absolutely.
There's been record heat for years now but the violent crime rate kept declining, so I don't think that's it, even if warm weather may correlate with violence to an extent which is an interest hypothesis. It's not like people can greatly avoid being outside 10 months of the year in cold areas of the world, but crime is still lower.
Since you're black, you're probably going to have an interesting time there. I would avoid the police if I were you.
Wasn't expecting a reference to the Stranger in this thread.
It's never been the heat in general, it's always been a summer spike thing thing.
I also wonder if cops are on a sort of "see what happens when we don't go around banging heads" message, believing citizens will just throw up their hands and say "fine, be racist, do whatever, just get crime down again". I think this was even an episode of South Park last year
I don't think it's that intentional (in a mustache-twirling 'they won't care about body cams if it gets this bad' way) but I do think the reigning back of the police has had some effect, probably in combination with the heroin and synthetic drug issues exploding. This is when police should be getting more involved to prevent issues, but they've lost trust of the communities that need them.
Baltimore's problems seem much more directly linked to the aftermath of the riots. They further depressed an already depressed area. I live in one of the poorest areas in the boroughs and it still doesn't compare to the worst parts of Baltimore I've been in.
entremet
Member
I gotta read this, but does the study establish causation?
Freeza Under The Shower
Member
Yes, that temperature thing is real. I though that was known.
It's even used as an example of spurious causation in sociology and criminology: ice creams is sold more in the summer, violent crime goes up in the summer, therefore increasing ice cream sales causes increases in violent crime.
Now that's obviously not the case, but other suggestions are simply that people have more reason to be outdoors and thereby more likely to encounter a bad situation because more people are outside during summer. I could even to that that by law of averages corrected for the length of the Earth's days, the amount of incidents might actually be exactly the same once standardized.
If that's not the case (a significant remainder of cases not within the explanatory range), then it's time to add heat stress to the hypothesis. I'll explain: moral behavior is impulse-rejection based, so basically willpower. Willpower however, has been demonstrated to be a finite quantity where after a certain amount of expending it, the brain just can't give a fuck anymore and will be much, much, much more likely to act on any otherwise negatively framed impulse. Like buying fast-food after a long day, impulse buying stuff you don't need, doing excessive gambling, doing substance abuse, and of course: violent behavior. Of course, a person must still possess a predisposition towards that behavior (and not apathy / depression) to actually have a neural circuit that can play out its routine (circuit: "I'm helping!" ) to cause that behavior. Someone who doesn't have that circuit won't respond in that matter right away, or even after pushing for it.
Boop.
It's even used as an example of spurious causation in sociology and criminology: ice creams is sold more in the summer, violent crime goes up in the summer, therefore increasing ice cream sales causes increases in violent crime.
Now that's obviously not the case, but other suggestions are simply that people have more reason to be outdoors and thereby more likely to encounter a bad situation because more people are outside during summer. I could even to that that by law of averages corrected for the length of the Earth's days, the amount of incidents might actually be exactly the same once standardized.
If that's not the case (a significant remainder of cases not within the explanatory range), then it's time to add heat stress to the hypothesis. I'll explain: moral behavior is impulse-rejection based, so basically willpower. Willpower however, has been demonstrated to be a finite quantity where after a certain amount of expending it, the brain just can't give a fuck anymore and will be much, much, much more likely to act on any otherwise negatively framed impulse. Like buying fast-food after a long day, impulse buying stuff you don't need, doing excessive gambling, doing substance abuse, and of course: violent behavior. Of course, a person must still possess a predisposition towards that behavior (and not apathy / depression) to actually have a neural circuit that can play out its routine (circuit: "I'm helping!" ) to cause that behavior. Someone who doesn't have that circuit won't respond in that matter right away, or even after pushing for it.
Boop.
No that wouldn't be helpful.
It's well known though not readily acknowledged that crime had gone down across the board.
It was useful to note that mass shootings have gone up opposite to this effect. It is useful now to point out that some cities are back sliding.
The problems in Chicago ate more well understood. It's time to analyze the other outliers.
We had an unusually mild winter in Toronto, and we also had an unusual spike in violent crime.
No one wants to go outside and fuck with each other when it's -15 outside, so when that changes...
Christopher
Member
I'm glad you keep googling studies - remember that defense in court.
But your honor it was HOT!
An accurate explanation for a statistical phenomenon isn't the same as a valid excuse for an individual's behavior. You're being disingenuous.
I thought it was pretty well known that violent crime goes up when the temps go up. I'm surprised at how many people seemed to be surprised by this.
More people are apt to go outside...
makingmusic476
Member
Sorry, my poorly worded and typo-laden post conveyed my point poorly. But basically, what this guy said:
It's speculated that cold winters deter crime as they encourage people to stay indoors, thus creating a correlation between warmer weather (summer) and higher crime rates. That would explain why the mild winters of the past two years also saw an increase in crime.
That would not, however, explain why crime is increasing during the summer months of the year, as those months are already hot.
That's a 25% increase from an already low number.
Imagine a city in the year 1991 with a homicide rate of 10 per year. Now imagine that city's homicide rate going down to 2 homicides in the year 2014, but then going up to 3 in the year 2015. Although statistically they just had their homicide rate increase by 50% from the year 2014, overall they are still much lower than they were a couple of decades ago
The point is the 25% increase in murders in 100 cities sounds bad on the surface, but when you dig down deeper you'll find they're being selective with their numbers to sell a story
Imagine a city in the year 1991 with a homicide rate of 10 per year. Now imagine that city's homicide rate going down to 2 homicides in the year 2014, but then going up to 3 in the year 2015. Although statistically they just had their homicide rate increase by 50% from the year 2014, overall they are still much lower than they were a couple of decades ago
The point is the 25% increase in murders in 100 cities sounds bad on the surface, but when you dig down deeper you'll find they're being selective with their numbers to sell a story
AbortedWalrusFetus
Member
If it was just economy you'd see this in Philly which is the most impoverished major city, but the murder rate here has been trending down.
St. Louis always appears much worse than it is because we're one of the only cities that is separate from its county. If you included the residents of all of "St. Louis", the homicides per resident would be much lower. Furthermore, like Chicago, it's mostly concentrated in one area.
evil solrac v3.0
Member
come on Christopher, you're a cop aren't you? you've seen how the streets get in the summer. shit is lit. it's hard to do a drive-by when there's 30 inches of snow on the ground.
That's a 25% increase from an already low number.
Imagine a city in the year 1991 with a homicide rate of 10 per year. Now imagine that city's homicide rate going down to 2 homicides in the year 2014, but then going up to 3 in the year 2015. Although statistically they just had their homicide rate increase by 50% from the year 2014, overall they are still much lower than they were a couple of decades ago
The point is the 25% increase in murders in 100 cities sounds bad on the surface, but when you dig down deeper you'll find they're being selective with their numbers to sell a story
or they're saying that the murder rate is up 25% this year
not everything is a conspiracy
Unfortunately things are rapidly headed in the complete opposite direction.
It's not much different in Rio though. Although there is violence everywhere, some places are very secure and hard to see bad stuff going on, while others are very dangerous.
Chicago might not be the safest place on earth today, but had it become the olympics host, the money the government would put in there for the olympics might've helped things a little bit if they did it right.
But of course the actual world is much more complicated than "hot weather causes more crimes". What is that relationship? Is it linear? Does it approach some asymptote or eventually turn around? Is the heat sufficient to explain the increase in its own?
Kirblar didn't really make the case properly here. He has a correlation (or even a causation) in mind but the simple "there is a relationship" isn't enough.
King Tubby
Member
Just driving home the failure that is the war on drugs. We need to come to a reckoning with just how much it's ruining our country.
How do you figure? That's a policy that's been going for like fifty years. It only just now started driving murder rates up why?
SapientWolf
Trucker Sexologist
Putting gang members behind bars is the sole upside of the war on drugs. Gang wars over crack was part of the reason why the 90's were so bad.
Things get hot. Crime goes up. This is known.
Why does this happen? Lots of theories, but it's not something really testable. We just know the relationship exists.
The murder rate isn't up 25% in those 100 cities. New York Times just went with a flashy title, that is leading to a lot of FUD in this thread.
Here's one of the figures in their article:
It looks like the included numbers and labels are HTML instead of part of the image, but the 3 largest arrows (Baltimore, St Louis, and Las Vegas) represent increases of 20%, 18%, and 14% respectively. So "significantly higher" for many of the other 25 cities highlighted is a 2-3% increase over the past 3 years.
Sure. But you claimed the heat is to blame "for a lot of this". Do you have any values in mind here? 2 degrees of average heat over the season causes how many more murders per capita? Is average heat even important, or does violence trigger at some tipping point temperature, in which case "days over 80" or whatever would be a more useful metric?
I'm just saying "a relationship exists" is barely useful. That's so many steps removed from recommending any policy moves. And it's many steps removed from even knowing if "it's the heat" is remotely sufficient for explaining the result. What's the residual on your unspecified heat metric?
I'm not trying to beef with you here. This is a video game forum, I'm not expecting r^2s and p-values and shit. I'm just saying let's be careful about making strong claims.
bodyboarder
Member
Lazy vs Crazy
Member
Police have stopped policing. What Baltimore, New York, Chicago, Cleveland and St. Louis all have in common is high profile police incidents. After the police suffer blowback for these, they circle the wagons and stop doing the same job that they used to out of fear.
yeah and more people drown when Ice cream sales go up, lots of theories there. Something weird about that ice cream...
Correlation != causation
One can probably speculate that it's logical when more people are outside or on vacation interacting with others during the summer or when the weather enables it, more people die.
Chris is simply mocking the idea that heat actually causes people to murder which many posts seem to be cryptically implying and hand waving. There are other factors at play, one can take the most ridiculous relations/correlations and imply all kinds of nonsensical garbage.
Patrick S.
Banned
Shit appens, mon.
King Gilga
Member
I read this as crime rising 25% in the 100 largest cities and was like woah.
It's not a conspiracy, and they're not saying the murder rate is up, they're saying the murder rate is up from the year before(which was a year with one of the lowest murder rates in recent history) in select cities. They don't say the murder rate is up in the 25 largest cities, because that wouldn't be true.. no, they're saying instead that the murder rate is up in 25% of the nation's 100 largest cities.
It's a very selective play on numbers
King Tubby
Member
Ask the criminologists linked in the OP who identify the drug market as the chief driver of the increased homicides.
Of course, gang members aren't the only ones put behind bars, but more importantly the lucrative, cut throat black market caused by drug prohibition is a huge part of what causes these gangs to be so powerful and ruthless.
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