August--the Hottest, Bloodiest Month : Violence: When the heat is on, the murder rate soars. The L.A. area averages 86 slayings during the month, and is matching that pace this year.

It’s August again, that time of year that compels some folks to leave their stuffy homes, seek relief from the summer heat and commit murder.

Blame it on the weather, too much free time or the extra gallons of beer consumed during vacation, but the eighth month is the season for homicide. In Los Angeles, between 1988 and 1991, there were 344 slayings in August, followed by July with 317 and September with 295. With more than 50 killings this month--including seven in one particularly sweltering 24-hour period this week--the tally is on pace with the August average of 86.

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“If we could find a few hundred dollars to buy some of these people a good swamp cooler, we might actually save a few lives,” said veteran Los Angeles Police Detective Jay St. John.

Violent behavior is so unpredictable that heat and idleness cannot be solely responsible for all of August’s attacks. Homicide patterns also fluctuate, occasionally giving less sultry months the dubious distinction of pushing more people over the edge.

But there is clearly some link, say psychologists and police officials, between summer temperatures and shortened tempers that seems to account for a rise in rage, murderous or otherwise. Despite the tendency to think of ourselves as highly evolved creatures, warm weather still has a remarkable ability to shorten fuses, boil blood and turn collars hot.

“It’s almost like hot temperatures are a symbolic gun in the hands of people,” said Stuart Fischoff, a Cal State L.A. psychologist, who teaches a course in aggression. “When it gets like this . . . you tend to shoot more.”

Literary types have long intuited what social scientists hypothesize. Shakespeare noted in “Romeo and Juliet” that, “For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.” Cicero, the Roman philosopher, observed: “The minds of men do in the weather share/Dark or serene as the day’s foul or fair.”

And in the 1954 science fiction film “Fondly Fahrenheit,” Alfred Bester described a heat-sensitive android that turned homicidal whenever the temperature hit 90 degrees.

With the thermometer soaring near 100 in Southern California for much of the month, the grisly toll has included: A man stabbed to death in Pomona, allegedly by his wife; a mother and daughter shot to death in Long Beach, allegedly by the father; a 66-year-old woman gunned down in Pico-Union, with her daughter sought as one of the suspects; a woman found strangled in a parking lot in Santa Fe Springs; a man found bound and suffocated in Pasadena, his infant son lying alive on top of him; a 15-year-old Hyde Park boy accused of killing his stepbrother and critically injuring his mother with a knife and hatchet, and an off-duty Los Angeles police officer killing his estranged wife and her boyfriend, then turning the gun on himself.

“People get hot and tired and they take it out on the closest person,” said Cindy Jacobs, assistant director of Rainbow Services, a San Pedro shelter for abused women and children, where calls for help rise and fall with the temperature. “Heat isn’t the cause of domestic violence . . . but it adds a lot more tension.”

Historically, August is the hottest month in Los Angeles, with an average daily temperature at the Civic Center of 74.7 degrees. Yet it may be other factors triggered by the heat, some experts say, that contribute most to the increase in violent crime.

More people are outdoors, on the streets or in parks trying to cool off--especially in crime-plagued neighborhoods where many residents cannot afford air conditioning. As a result, there are more predators on the prowl and more potential victims out and about.

To beat the heat, beer flows more freely, according to the Washington-based Beer Institute, which notes that in recent years the sale of beer nationwide has peaked in August at 558 million gallons. Anxieties may also be raised because August is a month favored by psychiatrists for vacations--leaving their patients alone and stressed-out.

The phenomenon was even chronicled in a novel, Judith Rossner’s “August.”

But there are those experts who believe that the season, rather than exerting only an indirect influence, sparks a physiological reaction capable of making people act more violently than under cooler conditions. That is the premise of a study by University of Missouri psychologist Craig A. Anderson, “Temperature and Aggression: Ubiquitous Effects of Heat on Occurrence of Human Violence.”

Anderson’s conclusions, published in 1989 in the American Psychological Assn.’s official bulletin, are that “hotter years, quarters of years, seasons, months and days all yield relatively more aggressive behaviors, such as murders, rapes, assaults, riots and wife beatings, among others.”

He cites numerous experiments, some dating to the 1800s, showing that hotter corners of the world suffer more uprisings and that hotter regions within countries report higher rates of violent crime. In one recent case, researchers studied crisis calls to 23 women’s shelters in five states, including California, and found that complaints of abuse rose with the temperature and peaked in August.

In another study, psychologists in Phoenix drove a car to an intersection and sat through a green light. They determined that the hotter the temperature, the more likely other motorists were to honk, as well as honk with more intensity. Furthermore, those without air-conditioned cars were more likely to be the honkers than those enjoying the comforts of an air-conditioned ride.

To be sure, the relationship between heat and behavior does not exist under all conditions. There appears to be a threshold above which it gets so hot that people turn lethargic instead of homicidal.

Nevertheless, rises in temperature are taken seriously in many quarters, so much so that in police roll calls around town, commanders remind officers before they hit the streets to exercise a little extra caution this time of year.

“When the heat goes up,” said Sgt. Joe Priebe of the LAPD’s West Los Angeles Division, “unusual things happen.”

Four-Year Murder Figures In the last few years in Los Angeles, more homicides have been committed in August than in any other month. Below, in descending order, are the city’s cumulative totals by month over the period from 1988 to 1991.

Month / 4-Year Total Aug./ 344 July / 317 Sept./ 295 Oct./ 271 Jan./ 255 June / 250 May / 249 April / 235 Dec. / 235 March / 229 Feb. / 220 Nov. / 219

Source: Los Angeles Police Department