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August 21, 2024

On heat, violence, and policing.

• Read Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation to understand how geography and its politics affect our wellbeing.

• Identify how many cool spaces are available to you within walking distance of your home. Of those, consider: how would your access to these spaces change if your race, ethnicity, gender identity, purchasing power, or mobility was different?

• Today’s article talks about heat-related violence, but offers a framework for thinking about other issues affecting our wellbeing. Think about another, and consider how you could apply the same thought process to addressing it. 

A growing body of research indicates that rising temperatures are correlated with violent crime, including homicides, sexual violence, assault, and robberies. These are most likely to happen when there’s a sudden swing in temperatures. Although there are slight variances by location, generally, heat-related violence in the U.S. is much higher in non-white, lower-income, urban, and densely populated areas. Women and girls are particularly vulnerable to domestic violence and sexual violence. Suicides are also more likely.

Researchers believe there are a variety of factors that affect this. First, there seems to be an adverse biological response to heat, one that can be exacerbated by other psychological stressors. There’s also the Routine Activity Theory, which argues that people with a higher propensity to spark violence might find themselves with more opportunities. That could be at an outdoor party where people are drinking, where a fight is more likely to occur if it’s hot. But it can also be due to how people may choose to stay indoors, increasing the likelihood of an instance of domestic violence.

Because this response fails to address how institutions and systems encourage heat-related violence. Its disproportionate impact maps over the same communities where we know public green spaces and trees are more limited, where local infrastructure is more likely to be outdated, and where public transportation is used more often. Lower-income communities are less likely to be able to afford rising energy prices and are more likely to be working in blue-collar jobs that more directly expose them to the heat (think sanitation workers, airport flight crews, construction workers, etc).

Many of these communities are victims of “organized abandonment,” a term coined by Ruth Wilson Gilmore to describe how businesses and government have intentionally disinvested from areas they deem unworthy of care. It reframes the lack of resources from an unfortunate outcome to an intentional, callous, and violent practice of failing to invest in them, redistributing resources elsewhere. It also helps us understand how prisons act as a catch-all for community members who are otherwise unresourced. Last year, unhoused 19-year-old Caleb Blair died in the Phoenix heat after being denied access to a gas station with air conditioning (The Guardian). His story highlights how comprehensively the state and government failed him.

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By this logic, the system has implied that individuals in abandoned communities are violent because of the heat – not because of the lack of resources to cope with it. And we’ll continue to see policing used to address it.

More public outdoor spaces that community members may use to stay cool, like the local recreation center or pool, might close in the interest of “public safety.” Retailers and other privately owned brick-and-mortar will bump up security. In schools, many of which are ill-equipped to meet rising temperatures, incidents between students and school resource officers or other forms of discipline are likely to grow. I also can’t stop thinking about how this will impact school dress codes, which are already wielded inequitably against kids based on their gender identity, body size, and racial or ethnic identity – yet another opportunity to criminalize efforts to stay cool. Since these responses fail to address the underlying issues, they’re likely to be ineffective and perhaps even increase the levels of violent actions between citizens and law enforcement. A study published just this June demonstrated correlations between high temperatures and violent encounters with police.

What if, instead, we looked at addressing heat-related violence not from an act of punishment, but a practice of care? And creating solutions that don’t focus on violence but on building our collective resilience to heat? I briefly outlined some of those solutions, including ones we can start on our own. Last week, the Biden administration released the nation’s first National Heat Strategy, which feels like a promising start to increasing our capacity to address this issue. They’ve also proposed the first federal safety standard for protecting workers from extreme heat on the job. These initiatives must acknowledge this organized abandonment in their response and ensure I’d love to see them measure the correlations between police violence and heat-related violence and work to mitigate that as a metric.

The heat also emphasizes the urgency for more comprehensive, community-driven public safety initiatives. Organizations like Mothers and Men Against Senseless Killing (MASK) in Chicago and the Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) program in Denver have created alternatives to calling the cops and using their own surveillance to mitigate incidents of harm. Initiatives like these could create an on-the-ground response that addresses violence and circulates resources in the community.

Luckily, investing in community care will help reduce other issues. Many of these approaches will provide access to warmth in the winter. Bringing trees and other foliage to areas without them won’t just cool things down but increase air quality and likely improve community members’ mental health. Investing in alternatives to policing can help decrease violence and foster trust regardless of the weather. If we can rally for a more nuanced response to heat, we can make a significant impact on all the issues that affect abandoned communities.