By Adam Pagnucco.
Crime and the night are linked in the popular mind. Lurking in the shadows, criminals pounce on their prey and disappear into darkness. In his never ending campaign to hunt them down, Bruce Wayne lives a mostly nocturnal life, patrolling the alleys of Gotham City from dusk to dawn. Montgomery County leaders seem to subscribe to Wayne’s philosophy as they intend to crack down on crime emanating from late night businesses. (Lord help us if MoCo compares in any way to Gotham!) Are they right?
Maybe. But it turns out that crime’s relationship to time is more complicated than the public might believe.
The ultimate crime fighter prepares for another long night.
Montgomery County’s online crime database has a date and time field. Given the preoccupation of both county leaders and the public with night-time crime, the relationship between crime and time of day is a testable matter. Let’s remember that this issue is not new. When I worked at the county council, then-County Executive Ike Leggett proposed a curfew intended to thwart night-time crime in urban areas, especially Downtown Silver Spring. After a ferocious battle with Council Member Phil Andrews spearheading the opposition, the county council tabled the proposal and it has not returned. Crime, however, never goes away.
Batman never stops fighting criminals and it seems that I will never stop crunching crime data. Accordingly, I converted the time field into hours. For example, my 12AM designation includes all incidents reported from midnight through 12:59 AM. Then I organized the hours into four blocks: morning (6 AM to noon), afternoon (noon to 6 PM), early night (6 PM to midnight) and late night (midnight to 6 AM). Using this categorization, I can report on crime type by time of day. I can even throw in geography too.
Let’s start with violent crime. The chart below shows the number of violent crime incident reports by hour of day from 2017 through 2022.
The midnight hour is the most dangerous for violent crime, but then there is a steep fall-off. There is a steady rate of violent crime from 3 PM through 9 PM.
The pie chart below breaks up violent crime into the above-mentioned four parts of the day.
The wee hours account for about as much violent crime as the morning. The afternoon and early night are the most common times for violent crime.
The chart below shows the change in violent crime for the four parts of the day over the last five years.
From 2017 through 2022, violent crime increased the most in the morning (up 14%) and the afternoon (up 13%). It increased by 7% in the early night and declined by 4% in the late night.
This data suggests that an approach to violent crime targeted after midnight is not likely to be very effective. After all, this misses 82% of violent crime, which is occurring at different times, and violent crime has actually been falling in late night.
But that’s not the end of the story. As it turns out, property crime behaves a bit differently. We will have more in Part Two.