Inequality, urban heat & crime

Most of us have heard folklore regarding summertime heat and violence -- suns out, guns out.  Trees – or the dearth of – made me think about these impacts from a research perspective.  I was working in Upstate NY making the rounds trying to get community members excited about our urban forestry and environmental justice work.  I’d present at neighborhood association meetings and invariably, a police officer, presenting on local crime, would be positioned on the agenda either just before or right after my presentation. Intuitively, I saw that many of the same neighborhoods at greatest risk of exposure to urban heat anomalies, largely due to inordinate amounts of impervious surface cover and a complimentary deficit of trees and other vegetation, were the neighborhoods that seemed most exposed to reported crimes, shots fired and gun crimes.

As cities warm due to climate change, and consequently make extreme heat within urban heat islands more punishing, will this have implications for neighborhoods to be at heightened risk of violence and temperature extremes?   

I looked at a several US cities (Atlanta, Charlotte, Rochester & Syracuse) – with a critical GIS assist from my final NY State-based grad student, Jimmy Rakotovao, and noticed a troubling pattern involving violence and temperature extremes. 

It’s critical to note that environmental racism plays a prominent feature in all of this -- social inequality has placed Black folk and marginalized communities, at heightened risk of environmental and public health vulnerability, including threats related to extreme heat and violence. This context is vital to foreground, as to exclude it would be to decouple the political, economic, and historic record from the analysis and (possibly) aid cynical attempts that may conflate race and violence.

Want to know more?  Check out the policy brief I did in conjunction with the Rockefeller Institute of Government (download the full report here).