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Heat and Law Enforcement A. Patrick BehrerValentin Bolotnyy Development EconomicsDevelopment Research GroupMay 2024 Policy Research Working Paper10776 Abstract Using administrative criminal records from Texas, this papershows how high temperatures affect the decision making ofpolice officers, prosecutors, and judges. It finds that policereduce the number of arrests made per reported crime onthe hottest days and that arrests made on these days aremore likely to be dismissed in court. For prosecutors, hightemperature on the day they announce criminal charges does not appear to affect the nature and severity of thecharges. However, judges dismiss fewer cases, issue longerprison sentences, and levy higher fines when ruling on hotdays. The results suggest that the psychological and cogni-tive consequences of exposure to high temperatures havemeaningful consequences for criminal defendants as theyinteract with the criminal justice system. The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about developmentissues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry thenames of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely thoseof the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank andits affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent. Heat,Crime,andPunishment∗ A.PatrickBehrer1,2andValentinBolotnyy3 1TheWorldBank 2StanfordUniversity,CenterforFoodSecurityandtheEnvironment 3StanfordUniversity,HooverInstitution JELCodes:Q5,H75,K42,D91.Keywords:Climatechange,CriminalJustice,Judges,Heat 1Introduction Heat increases criminal activity. This fact has been established by a wide literature acrossfields, including psychology, economics, and political science.Individual criminal activityincreases on hotter days (Ranson, 2014) and intra-group conflict increases with increases inheat (Burke et al., 2015). What drives the increase in interpersonal conflict, and individuals’commission of crimes in particular, remains unclear. Various explanations for the effect of heat on crime have been offered. Early economicswork uses a Becker-style model to focus on potential reductions in the likelihood of beingcaught, because heat increases the costs of police effort, or on the increased relative benefitsof crime due to heat-driven reductions in economic payoffs from other activities.Work inpsychology, meanwhile, has focused on the role of heat in mediating aggressive behavior(Anderson, 1989; Anderson et al., 2000; Baron and Bell, 1976). More recent economics workhas also examined how the impact of heat on crime varies across neighborhood characteristics- heat appears to have larger impacts in older and poorer neighborhoods - to suggest thatheat’s differential effects may be a manifestation of differential investment in early childhoodcoupled with underlying psychological mechanisms (Heilmann and Kahn, 2019). A clear implication of a psychological explanation for the increase in crime on hotter daysis that heat may not only impact potential criminal defendants but also the police chargedwith arresting them, the prosecutors responsible for prosecuting them, and the judges whoultimately preside over their trials. Despite the robust literature on heat and crime, therehas been much less attention given to how heat impacts the whole range of actors in thejudicial system.Three recent papers work to address this gap:Obradovich et al. (2018)suggest that heat can reduce police effort and?find that police do not commit more fatalshootings due to heat. Studying immigration judges, Heyes and Saberian (2019) measure adecline in asylum grants when judges issue decisions on hot days. In this paper, we re-examine the question of heat’s impact on criminal activity using themost comprehensive data set yet brought to bear on this topic. Using data on the universe ofmore than 10 million arrests across the state of Texas from 2010 to 2017, with comprehensivedata on the subsequent prosecution and trials of these arrests, we examine how heat impactsthe commission of crimes and the defendants’ subsequent judicial outcomes. Our data areunique in providing detail at the individual defendant level across a large geographic regionand in including outcomes in the judicial process.We couple these data with data on allcrimes reported in the jurisdiction of the Houston Police Department, the 5thlargest in theUnited States, to examine how heat affects arrests relative to reported crimes. Our data contain demographic information on the arrested individual, including their home address, race, and date of birth, as well as information on the charge at arrest. Cru-cially, these data