IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jcjust/v38yi4p359-367.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Bad moon on the rise? Lunar cycles and incidents of crime

Author

Listed:
  • Schafer, Joseph A.
  • Varano, Sean P.
  • Jarvis, John P.
  • Cancino, Jeffrey M.

Abstract

Popular cultures in Western societies have long espoused the notion that phases of the moon influence human behavior. In particular, there is a common belief the full moon increases incidents of aberrant, deviant, and criminal behavior. Using police, astronomical, and weather data from a major southwestern American city, this study assessed whether lunar cycles related with rates of reported crime. The findings fail to support popular lore, which has suggested that lunar phase influenced the volume of crime reported to the police. Future research directions examining qualitative rather than quantitative aspects of this problem may yield further inform the understanding of whether lunar cycles appreciably influence demands for policing services.

Suggested Citation

  • Schafer, Joseph A. & Varano, Sean P. & Jarvis, John P. & Cancino, Jeffrey M., 2010. "Bad moon on the rise? Lunar cycles and incidents of crime," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 38(4), pages 359-367, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jcjust:v:38:y::i:4:p:359-367
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047-2352(10)00058-9
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Magnone, Edoardo, 2013. "A scientometric look at calendar events," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 7(1), pages 101-108.
    2. Sorg, Evan T. & Taylor, Ralph B., 2011. "Community-level impacts of temperature on urban street robbery," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 39(6), pages 463-470.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jcjust:v:38:y::i:4:p:359-367. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jcrimjus .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.