Police put more officers on beat to tackle ‘full-moon violence’
By Tom Pugh, The Independent, 06 June 2007
Extra police will be deployed on the streets of Brighton during full moons after officers linked levels of violent crime and the lunar cycle.
Sussex Police said research by the force into factors which influenced people’s behaviour found a correlation between violent and unruly incidents and full moons, with a rise in aggressive behaviour in pubs and nightclubs in the south coast resort. A Sussex Police spokeswoman said more officers would be assigned to street patrol duties during full moons over the summer months.
Inspector Andy Parr said: “I compared a graph of full moons and a graph of last year’s violent crimes and there is a trend. People tend to be more aggressive.”
The link between full moons and extremes in human behaviour has been identified in past scientific studies. Professor Michal Zimecki, of the Polish Academy of Sciences, analysed dozens of studies that take lunar activity into account, and argued that a full moon could affect criminal activity and health. One such piece of research, a three-month psychological study of 1,200 inmates at Armley jail, Leeds, in 1998, found a marked increase in violent incidents during the first and last quarter of each lunar month.
But despite the wealth of evidence suggesting a link, no one has been able to explain it. Some believe that as humans are mostly made of water, the lunar gravity pulls us just as it does the sea.