Urban Heat Islands: Do Heat Waves Trigger Increase in Crime?
23rd June 2012
Since “urban” is synonymous with minority and Black in American lexicon, anytime meteorologists start predicting heat waves for cities with vibrant, diverse populations like New York City, Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Memphis, Milwaukee, or Philadelphia, the great fear is that the risk of a “crime wave” rises with each uptick in the Fahrenheit temperature.
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Violent crime committed by Black people in Philadelphia, Chicago, Newark, St. Louis, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Washington D.C., and Baltimore might increase, but it’s already at astronomically high rates (compared to the white population) that it’s hard to notice a difference.
But cities that are “overwhelmingly” white (does any newspaper ever say Detroit is “suffocatingly” Black… because they should) don’t have the same problem with increases in temperature.