Climate Change and Crime Revisited: An Exploration of Monthly Temperature Anomalies and UCR Crime Data

A growing body of research suggests a positive connection between climate change and crime, but few studies have explored the seasonal nature of that link. Here, we examine how the impact of climate change on crime may partly depend on specific times of the year as recent climatological research suggests that climate change may have a diverging impact during different times of the year. To do so, we utilize the largest, most current dataset of all main categories of reported crime by month and year in the United States—the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Uniform Crime Reports. We employ historical weather data collected by the Global Historical Climatology Network to measure climate change, and develop a procedure that weighs and connects these data to individual crime reporting agencies. We discover not only a positive association between climate change and crime but also substantial monthly variation in this association