April is a historically violent month for Richmond

It’s almost like a Richmond urban legend: when the weather starts to warm up people start to die. But is that true? I’m not sure. But I am sure that April is historically one of Richmond’s most violent months.

April 17, 2012; 1:50 PM • by Ross Catrow

Last night two men shot each other on Richmond’s Northside, one was taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries. Comments on Twitter about the shooting were (predictably?) blasé, a lot of them having similar sentiment to this one:

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/Soo_Spoiledd/status/192054675720245248”]

It’s almost like a Richmond urban legend: when the weather starts to warm up people start to die. But is that true? I’m not sure.¹ But I am sure that April is historically one of Richmond’s most violent months. Here’s a chart of cumulative murders² in RVA by month (green bars are 1992-2011, orange bars are 2002-2011):

Between January and April, take your pick on when to stay indoors. Here’s the same data but presented as monthly averages of murders:

It’s great to see the average number of murders, across all months, fall so dramatically over a decade. But, even recently, April still sticks out as a month with more murders than average (Aprils average 6.3 murders in the last decade compared to a yearly average of 5.3). So far, for this April, there have been three murders–assuming the shooting last night does not turn fatal. If this total holds at three it will be one of the least violent Aprils since 1992.

Finally, this graph is neither here nor there, but it is really encouraging. Total murders by year since 1992:

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Footnotes

It would be interesting for someone to pull temperature data over the last twenty years to compare with murders. Anyone? Anyone? ↩
This data is mostly accurate. A few of the murders have been cleared as non-murders over time, so don’t go citing this post in your doctoral thesis. ↩

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