A Seasonal Crime?: A Quantitative Examination of the Relationship Between Criminal Charges in the City of Lynchburg and Seasons of the Year with Reference to Gender and Race

The controversy regarding gender and race has resulted in the tendency by many scholars to focus on one or a few crime categories, such as theft or homicide, in order to make their findings more specific. According to Sommers & Baskin (1992), gender may cause misinterpretation without the inclusion of race when researching violent crime because both are inherently linked to an individual’s identity. It was determined that seasonal crime, specifically property-related crimes, is associated with routine activities theory (Hipp et. al., 2004). In this study, data from the City of Lynchburg Office of Corrections in Virginia was sorted based upon 34 crime categories, and binomial logistic regression models were examined using gender and race as predictor variables. The results of this study suggest support for that hypothesis that there are significant gender and race disparities to both violent and property crime categories. These results illustrate the merge between general strain theory and routine activities theory in the commission of a crime. However, temperature-aggression was not supported. Future research is detrimentally important to shed light on community-police relations and how to reduce the prevalence of specific gender- and race-based disparities among particular crime categories