Unbearable heat is not a justifiable defense for crime.
But there is an unverified tenet of conventional wisdom that says as temperatures rise, so do instances of crime.
For Alfred Hitchcock’s first television series, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” Ray Bradbury wrote an episode based on this concept, “Shopping for Death.”
In it, two retired insurance men try to save an emotionally-strained, angry woman — dealing with the heat of a New York City summer in the mid-’50s — from ending up dead. One of the men, Clarence Fox, believes the heat leads to dangerously careless behavior.
He further thinks that above 92 degrees Fahrenheit, people have a higher inclination for murder.
“Under 90 men’s tempers stay cool, but right at 92 degrees we all turn irritable, itchy, out of sorts,” Fox says.
Needless to say, the woman is unmoved by the men. Her husband, a longshoreman coming home drunk after work, proves the insurance salesman right when he does the deed off-screen.
The temperature was 92 degrees.
And while such notions are good for melodrama, how accurate are they?
In Kinston, high-profile gun crime caught headlines in recent days, including Friday’s homicide. Monday, there was a report of shots fired into a building, and a bomb scare at the Lenoir County Courthouse.
“Right now, it’s too early this year to see a correlation,” Kinston Department of Public Safety spokesman Woody Spencer said. “A lot of times, you don’t even see a peak. But I think, more than heat, is the fact that time changes and people are out more.
“And, of course, later in the summer when it gets hot, people lose their temper. But it’s hard to say specifically if there’s a correlation between the two.”
Lenoir County Sheriff Chris Hill believes, also, that people spending more time together outside may have more to do with assaults than the temperature itself.
“We’ve not ever done a study on it,” Hill said. “But I’m sure someone did a study on it, just like someone did a study on whether when the moon was full, if there were more crimes. I think that’s all a bunch of hoo-hah.”
Craig A. Anderson conducted a study at Iowa State — published in a journal of the Association for Psychological Science — looking at the concept. He noted correlations between heat and aggression date back centuries, and quoted a remark made in “Romeo and Juliet.” He concluded that there is some evidence heat is a factor.
“Hot temperatures increase aggression by directly increasing feelings of hostility and indirectly increasing aggressive thoughts,” Anderson wrote.
The study showed for every 2 degrees of increased average temperature, there were nine more homicides or assaults per every 100,000 people.
And, a March 2012 analysis of violent crimes by Chicago Magazine found incidents increased during the spring and summer, decreasing in the fall and winter.
But, explanations given by local law enforcement could apply to Chicago, as well.
Brandon Keim wrote a piece for Wired in 2011 on heat-crime causation, and appeared on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” to discuss it.
Conclusion — the jury is out, as it has been since the beginning of recorded history.
“There are no hard and fast conclusions to be drawn right now and, you know, to go from correlation to causation is impossible at this time,” Keim said.
He continued, “But I think there are a lot of interesting questions that are raised and lots of interesting speculations about the, you know, the nature of human behavior and its intersection with, you know, weather itself.”
Wes Wolfe can be reached at 252-559-1075 or wes.wolfe@kinston.com. Follow him on Twitter @WolfeReports.