From
the Metro section yesterday:
The prime time for murder is clear: summertime. Indeed, it is close to a constant, one hammered home painfully from June to September across the decades. And the breakdown of deadly brutality can get even more specific... Summer is when people get together. More specifically, casual drinkers and drug users are more likely to go to bars or parties on weekends and evenings, as opposed to a Tuesday morning. These people in the social mix, flooding the city’s streets and neighborhood bars, feed the peak times for murder, experts say.
From David Simon's
HOMICIDE (1991):
Summer is a four-to-twelve shift of nightsticks and Western District wagon runs, with three hundred hard cases on the Edmondson Avenue sidewalk between Payson and Pulaski, eyefucking each other and every passing radio car. Summer is a ninety-minute backup in the Hopkins emergency room, an animal chorus of curses and pleas from the denizens of every district lockup, a nightly promise of yet another pool of blood on the dirty linoleum in yet another Federal Street carryout. Summer is a barroom cutting up on Druid Hill, a ten-minute gun battle in the Terrace, a daylong domestic dispute that ends with the husband and wife both fighting the cops. Summer is the seasons of motiveless murder, of broken-blade steak knives and bent tire irons; it's the time for truly dangerous living, the season of massive and immediate retaliation, the 96-degree natural habitat of the Argument That Will Be Won.
Different cities, but the same point.
2 comments:
I would have liked that article in the Metro section better if it had a graphic with the numbers of homicides vs. months. I guess I'm just used to looking at data to accompany claims like "the prime time for murder is clear".
But maybe the reason they didn't include it it because the prime time for murder actually appears to be late spring. It didn't take me long to find their data (pooled data for 2003-2009 at http://projects.nytimes.com/crime/homicides/map, then click on "Month and time of day"), and while it does seem to undulate seasonally,
1. the numbers of murders in May and June is higher than for August and September, contrary to what the article would have you believe,
2. there's another peak in January and December, although admittedly this peak is smaller than the spring one, and
3. the magnitude of the change is just not very large.
I would expect the numbers of murders to oscillate somewhat, regardless of the season: one killing might lead to a series of revenge killings, but eventually the would-be gunslingers are either dead or in jail (or just tired of their gunslinging ways), so the numbers would back off a bit, simply as a result of the numbers being higher earlier.
Science is in good hands if they be yours. I can't figure out how to find the specific number of homicides per month but it did seem strange that they led with the summer stuff and then said "By which we mean... September."
I can't remember if Simon's book has statistics in it but he would have had access to those when he was writing it about the BPD. I hope he looked a little more closely.
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