{"id":5395,"date":"2015-02-05T10:06:57","date_gmt":"2015-02-05T16:06:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/?p=5395"},"modified":"2015-02-06T18:52:03","modified_gmt":"2015-02-07T00:52:03","slug":"does-chicagos-homicide-rate-rise-and-fall-with-cold-winter-weather-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/does-chicagos-homicide-rate-rise-and-fall-with-cold-winter-weather-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Does Chicago\u2019s homicide rate rise and fall with cold winter weather?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By Dean DeChiaro<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s evidence to support the conventional wisdom that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chicagomag.com\/Chicago-Magazine\/The-312\/March-2012\/Heat-and-Crime-Its-Not-Just-You-Feeling-It\/\">as temperatures in Chicago increase, so does crime.<\/a> But that narrative usually focuses on spring and summer, when statistics show violent crimes, including homicide, occur most frequently. But do those summer patterns also hold true for a particularly mild winter?<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>According to <a href=\"http:\/\/crime.chicagotribune.com\/chicago\/shootings\">information compiled by the Chicago Tribune<\/a>, 145 shootings took place in Chicago this January, compared with 100 shootings in January 2014. This January also saw seven more homicides. Temperature-wise, 2015 was on average 7 degrees warmer than 2014. So in a city known for its brutal cold, do more homicides occur when Mother Nature lets up a bit?<\/p>\n<p>The numbers don\u2019t exactly say no, but they say probably not. According to information gathered from RedEye\u2019s Chicago homicide tracker and Weather Underground, the number of January homicides over the past decade has ranged from 20 to 44, while the average mean temperature ranges from 16 to 36 degrees. The number of homicides generally rises and falls with the temperatures, but with notable exceptions \u2014 for instance, January 2006 was the warmest of the past decade, but only 27 homicides were recorded, as opposed to 41 in 2012, the next warmest.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_809\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-809\" style=\"width: 924px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/justus\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2015\/02\/DataHOMICIDES.png\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-809 size-full\" src=\"http:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/justus\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2015\/02\/DataHOMICIDES.png\" alt=\"DataHOMICIDES\" width=\"924\" height=\"822\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-809\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">(Weather Underground and RedEye, Dean DeChiaro\/Medill)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Derral Cheatwood, a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Texas at San Antonio, has written about the correlations between violent crime and weather in urban settings and said he doesn\u2019t see the same patterns in Chicago\u2019s winter numbers that one typically finds in summer statistics.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt doesn\u2019t seem as if very cold weather dampens the homicide rate,\u201d Cheatwood said, noting that Chicago\u2019s frigid climate might prevent it from experiencing what he calls the \u201ccold floor,\u201d meaning a temperature below which crime tends to taper off.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_810\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-810\" style=\"width: 922px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/justus\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2015\/02\/DataTEMPS.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-810 size-full\" src=\"http:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/justus\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2015\/02\/DataTEMPS.png\" alt=\"DataTEMPS\" width=\"922\" height=\"824\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-810\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">(Weather Underground and RedEye, Dean DeChiaro\/Medill)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Cheatwood also suggested a reason that, despite a few outlying years, Chicago\u2019s January homicide rates don\u2019t always correlate with its fluctuating temperatures.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn cities with such extreme cold, you basically adjust to the weather around you,\u201d he said. \u201cThere is impact of heat [on crime rates], and I tend to think there is a dampening effect with cold. Up there it\u2019s like, \u2018Hey, it\u2019s a Chicago winter, whatever.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In San Antonio, Cheatwood said, you might see the opposite effect.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt gets up to 90 degrees in Chicago in the summer and that\u2019s a heat wave, but in San Antonio that\u2019s nothing,\u201d he said. \u201cIf it got as cold down here as it does in Chicago, I\u2019m not sure what would happen.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Cheatwood also emphasized the importance of societal factors \u2014 especially those related to criminal networks \u2014 that could affect crime rates measured on a month-to-month basis.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen you disrupt a criminal market or start a gang war, these numbers can go way up or down,\u201d he said. \u201cThere could be one homicide that takes three or four lives. I\u2019d be surprised if [years with more homicides] aren\u2019t just statistical oddities.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Eric van Zanten, a Chicago-based Web developer and self-described \u201ccivic-minded hacker,\u201d has created <a href=\"http:\/\/crime.static-eric.com\/\">an online tool for viewing the frequency of crime in Chicago as it relates to temperature.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou have this concept about crime and weather, and every spring people are going to say that summer\u2019s coming and crime will increase,\u201d van Zanten said. \u201cI\u2019m kind of a skeptical person so I tried to prove that.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>And though the results show that the rates of most violent crimes tend to increase with temperature, Cheatwood and van Zanten were reluctant to say whether they believed police could benefit from tracking crime and weather together.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think police will use weather loosely,\u201d Cheatwood said. \u201cIt becomes a minor consideration most, if not all, of the time.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A spokesman for the Chicago Police Department did not respond to an email requesting comment.<\/p>\n<p>Van Zanten said that the data could be used to fuel other initiatives, pointing out the city\u2019s One Summer youth jobs program that showed a 43 percent reduction in violent-crime arrests by participants.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think there\u2019s more nuance to reducing crime than figuring out whether it\u2019s going to be hot,\u201d he said. \u201cBut there\u2019s a lot sitting in that crime data, and stuff like this will become more useful.\u201d<\/p>\n<div id=\"featurecaption\">Photo at top: Violent crime rates tend to decrease in the winter in neighborhoods such as Lake View when fewer people are outside. (Dean DeChiaro\/Medill)<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Dean DeChiaro There\u2019s evidence to support the conventional wisdom that as temperatures in Chicago increase, so does crime. But that narrative usually focuses on spring and summer, when statistics show violent crimes, including homicide, occur most frequently. But do those summer patterns also hold true for a particularly mild winter?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":5400,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,243],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-public-affairs","category-winter-2015"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Does Chicago\u2019s homicide rate rise and fall with cold winter weather? - Medill Reports Chicago<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/does-chicagos-homicide-rate-rise-and-fall-with-cold-winter-weather-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Does Chicago\u2019s homicide rate rise and fall with cold winter weather? - Medill Reports Chicago\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By Dean DeChiaro There\u2019s evidence to support the conventional wisdom that as temperatures in Chicago increase, so does crime. 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