The Relationship Between Outside Temperature and the Rate of Aggravated Assaults in Los Angeles, Ca: a Correlation Analysis

The Relationship between Outside Temperature and the Rate of Aggravated Assaults in Los Angeles, CA: A Correlation Analysis

April 21, 2014

Background

Long has it been rumored that humans are more aggressive in higher temperatures. I aimed to find evidence of this with an analysis of regression and correlation between aggravated assault charges and monthly averages of the maximum daily temperatures in Fahrenheit. I chose to not include murders in the charges that I observed. The deeply-ingrained social conditioning humans have against killing others is less-likely to be disregarded simply as a result of temperature changes, and the large window of severity that aggravated assaults encompasses shows finer incremental rises in aggression in the collective. I did not include non-aggravated assaults, as they are generally not representative of human aggression. I chose to observe the city of Los Angeles because of its size (and not coincidentally, availability of historical criminal records) and relatively high year-round temperatures when compared with the rest of the United States.

Data Collection

I collected annual records from the Los Angeles Police Department and filtered the aggravated assaults that took place during each year. I then utilized pivot tables to find the count of incidents that occurred in each month. I divided each month’s count into the annual total to get relative percentages and control for the year-over-year growth/decline in incidents. I then compared these monthly percentages of annual aggravated assaults to the monthly averages of maximum daily temperature (in Fahrenheit) as found on the online Los Angeles Almanac (National Weather Service, 2014). While a median value would be more effective in accounting for outliers (extreme temperatures) this data was not readily available for such a considerable window of time. I plotted the monthly temperature average (independent) with its associated percentage of annual assaults (dependent)...