Earlier this week we posed the question of how weather affects crime patterns. Police said they saw more domestic incidents in relation to their total call volume, but domestic complaints had actually dropped last weekend instead of increasing as people were forced into close quarters for long periods of time. Meanwhile, homicides and violent crime seemingly continued unabated, with two killings and at least one non-fatal stabbing just off the Block, Baltimore's adult entertainment hub. The prior 20-inch snowfall in December saw four homicides.

The blizzard that struck the area of Tuesday and Wednesday, however, was a different story.

Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III just said at a city news conference that the most serious calls handled by police over the past day were two street robberies and a commercial burglary, reports Peter Hermann. We're also looking into an incident in which police used a Taser on a man at Light Streets and Key Highway early Wednesday afternoon, but for the most part it sounds like things were peaceful.

"In the entire city, this is, like, incredible," Bealefeld said.

I just got a return phone call from Ellen G. Cohn, a researcher at Florida International University, who has extensively studied the effects of weather on crime and who I reached out to earlier this week for the aforementioned story. She said that the only variable with a consistent relationship to crime is temperature, saying crime rises with heat up to a certain point, "when the need to escape the heat becomes more important than the need to beat up the person that insulted you." She cited three elements needed for crime: a motivated offender, a suitable target, and absence of a capable guardian. "Snow makes it very difficult to get those three things in one place," she said. But it might also drive crime as a reaction to the stress and strain of the extreme conditions, Cohn said.