Abstract
Climate and weather have been linked to criminal activity. The connection between climatological conditions and crime is of growing importance as we seek to understand the societal implications of climate change. This study describes the mechanisms theorized to link annual variations in climate to crime in California and examines the effect of drought on statewide crime rates from 2011–2015. California has suffered severe drought since 2011, resulting in intensely dry winters and several of the hottest days on record. It is likely that the drought increased economic stress and shifted routine activities of the population, potentially increasing the likelihood of crime. We used a synthetic control method to estimate the impact of California’s drought on both property and violent crimes. We found a significant increase in property crimes during the drought, but no effect on violent crimes. This result was robust to several sensitivity analyses, including a negative control.
Highlights
The effect of climate on conflict and criminal activity has been demonstrated across the world
Property crime was much more common than violent crime in California, but both were in periods of decline from 2000–2010, the pre-drought period (Fig 1)
The covariates used to calculate the weights for the synthetic control series are listed in Table 1, along with their values in California, the mean values for the rest of the states, and their values in both the property and violence synthetic controls
Summary
The effect of climate on conflict and criminal activity has been demonstrated across the world. Research suggests daily and seasonal variation in weather patterns can impact crime rates [6,12,13,14]. The links between climatological conditions and crime are of growing importance as the scientific community seeks to understand the full societal implications of climate change. Understanding these relationships is important in places like California, where climate change is anticipated to have major impacts on the agricultural economy and quality of both urban and rural life
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