IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/10776.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Heat and Law Enforcement

Author

Listed:
  • Behrer,Arnold Patrick
  • Bolotnyy,Valentin

Abstract

Using administrative criminal records from Texas, this paper shows how high temperatures affect the decision making of police officers, prosecutors, and judges. It finds that police reduce the number of arrests made per reported crime on the hottest days and that arrests made on these days are more likely to be dismissed in court. For prosecutors, high temperature on the day they announce criminal charges does not appear to affect the nature and severity of the charges. However, judges dismiss fewer cases, issue longer prison sentences, and levy higher fines whenruling on hot days. The results suggest that the psychological and cognitive consequences ofexposure to high temperatures have meaningful consequences for criminal defendants as they interact with the criminal justice system.

Suggested Citation

  • Behrer,Arnold Patrick & Bolotnyy,Valentin, 2024. "Heat and Law Enforcement," Policy Research Working Paper Series 10776, The World Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:10776
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/099818005162425050/pdf/IDU11f8ec38311d471489b18529195425ea06306.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    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:wbk:wbrwps:10776. 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: Roula I. Yazigi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dvewbus.html .

    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.