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Although temperature aggression theory maintains that a high temperature engenders more aggressive behavior by irritating individuals, routine activity theory asserts that violent crime increases as temperature rises because of enhanced interaction among the public in outdoor settings. We investigate the effect of maximum daily temperature on whether crime victims are physically injured during the commission of an outdoor criminal offense in Cleveland, Ohio. We focus on violent crimes occurring outdoors because most U.S. households have central air-conditioning or room air conditioners. Two autoregressive integrative moving average (ARIMA) analyses provide support for routine activity theory because although maximum daily temperature has a strong positive effect on the frequency of violent crimes occurring outdoors, it has little influence on the physical injury of crime victims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-help theory posits that a negative perception of police engenders firearm violence rather than simply amplifying individuals' ownership of firearms for self-defense. A racially diverse police force may help decrease firearm use among Black citizens because marginalized groups in society often view a governmental institution as legitimate and impartial when the racial composition of the institution mirrors the population it represents. Analyses using multilevel data show that as the racial diversity of a city's police department increases, Black criminal offenders are much less likely to use a firearm in an aggravated assault and in a violent crime. These findings buttress the claim that the institutional legitimacy of a police agency can be enhanced by descriptive racial representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The current study used data drawn from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and the census to investigate the relationship between indicators of interracial and intraracial economic inequality and violent crime rates, including White-on-Black, White-on-White, Black-on-White, and Black-on-Black offenses. Multivariate regression results for ninety-one cities showed that while total inequality and intraracial inequality had no significant association with offending rates, interracial inequality was a strong predictor of the overall violent crime rate and the Black-on-Black crime rate. Overall, these results were interpreted as consistent with J.R. Blau and Blau''s (1982) relative deprivation thesis, with secondary support for P.M. Blau''s (1977) macrostructural theory of intergroup relations. The findings also helped to clarify the unresolved theoretical issue regarding which reference group was most important in triggering relative deprivation among Blacks. It appeared that prior studies were unable to find support for the relative deprivation thesis for Black crime rates because of data and methodological limitations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Efforts to apply racial threat theory to explain interracial violence in America are restricted to historically dated events such as lynchings or to relatively infrequently occurring events such as race riots, hate crimes or interracial homicides. The present study extends extant research by using county-level data, drawn from South Carolina's National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), race-specific voting data, and demographic data to investigate the relationship between racial threat and interracial and intraracial violent crimes. Results from a pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis show that one dimension of racial threat, economic competition, has a modest substantive effect on interracial crimes involving white perpetrators and black victims--as economic competition increases between whites and blacks, whites commit more violent crimes against blacks. Political threat has no statistically discernable effect on the white-on-black crime rate. Further, neither measure of racial threat, economic competition nor political threat is associated with the black-on-white crime rate, the white-on-white crime rate or with the black-on-black crime rate. The implications of these findings for racial threat theory are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using four years of county-level data drawn from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) for South Carolina and a pooled cross-sectional time-series research design, we investigate whether gun availability is related to violent crime, gun crime, juvenile gun crime, and violent crimes committed with a knife. We contribute to the literature by distinguishing between illegal and legal gun availability and by using a comprehensive measure of gun crime. Results show a strong positive relationship between illegal gun availability and violent crime, gun crime, and juvenile gun crime. Little or no effect for the legitimate gun availability measure is observed in any of the estimated models. Findings also reveal that illegal guns have little influence on violent crimes committed with a knife. Offenders seem not to be substituting knives or other cutting instruments when illegal firearms become less available. A supplemental analysis also indicates no evidence of simultaneity between gun availability and violent crime. The strong and consistent effect of illegal rather than legal gun availability on violent crime has important policy implications, because it suggests that greater attention should be directed at devising ways for legitimate gun owners to better secure their weapons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study advances the literature by examining the effect of carbon monoxide emissions on the degree of physical violence exhibited by a criminal offender during the commission of a criminal offense. A multilevel analysis is conducted to probe the relationship between carbon monoxide levels and whether a criminal offender physically injures his or her victim. The offender-level data are drawn from the National Incident-Based Reporting System and represent 139,709 single offender/single victim crime incidents for 109 cities in 22 states during 2015. Carbon monoxide concentration and city-level contextual control variables are drawn from other sources. Results show that while carbon monoxide emissions have little effect on the overall level of physical violence displayed by a criminal offender, both the offender's race and sex moderate the relationship between air pollution and victim injury. As carbon monoxide levels rise in a city, both black and male offenders are more likely to injure their victims physically. We theorize that black and male offenders are more vulnerable to the violence-inducing effects of air pollution because of pronounced racial and sex differences in carbon monoxide exposure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dwelling in a violence-plagued neighborhood may amplify obesity by engendering psychological distress or by cultivating a sedentary, homebound lifestyle. This relationship is speculated to be especially relevant for black and Hispanic citizens because they are much more likely than whites to live in violence-beleaguered neighborhoods. Results from two multilevel analyses of 12,645 residents living in 34 New York City neighborhoods show that, while the violent crime rate does not have a direct effect on obesity, it does condition the relationships between race, ethnicity, and obesity. As the violent crime rate rises in a neighborhood, the probability of both a black and Hispanic resident being obese increases, controlling for both individual and neighborhood factors. The BMI of black and Hispanic residents is also higher in neighborhoods beset by violence. These findings suggest that violent crime may be a salient but unappreciated factor in explaining both racial and ethnic differences in obesity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]