HEAT AND CRIME IN THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST

Abstract

Amid the concern of rising temperatures, the relationships between heat and homicide, violent crime, and property crime rates have become a prevalent issue. This research utilizes a linear regression model to estimate the relationship between summer average day, average night, and high temperatures and homicide, violent crime, and property crime in Tucson, Arizona. Our results suggest that violent crime is positively correlated with temperature and reflects a curvilinear relationship, with both high and low extremes associated with decreasing crime rates. Property crime showed a positive linear correlation with a nearly statistically significant normality of residuals value. Our homicide model, on the other hand, suggests temperature was not significantly associated with the variance in homicides, perhaps due to low homicide Uniform Crime Report (UCR) counts across census blocks in Tucson between 2018 and 2021.