Moon "[s]urgeons will not operate because blood clotting is not effective and the police have to put more people on the street.". A spokesman for the Royal College of Surgeons said they would "laugh their heads off" at the suggestion they could not operate on the full Moon. Human behavior Epilepsy A study into epilepsy found a significant negative correlation between the mean number of epileptic seizures per day and the fraction of the Moon that is illuminated, but the effect resulted from the overall brightness of the night, rather than from the moon phase per se. Law and order Senior police officers in Brighton, UK, announced in June 2007 that they were planning to deploy more officers over the summer to counter trouble they believe is linked to the lunar cycle. This followed research by the Sussex Police force that concluded there was a rise in violent crime when the Moon was full. A spokeswoman for the police force said "research carried out by us has shown a correlation between violent incidents and full moons". A police officer responsible for the research told the BBC that "From my experience of 19 years of being a police officer, undoubtedly on full moons we do seem to get people with sort of strange behavior – more fractious, argumentative." Police in Ohio and Kentucky have blamed temporary rises in crime on the full Moon. In January 2008, New Zealand's Justice Minister Annette King suggested that a spate of stabbings in the country could have been caused by the lunar cycle. A reported correlation between Moon phase and the number of homicides in Miami-Dade County was found, through later analysis, not to be supported by the data and to have been the result of inappropriate and misleading statistical procedures. Motorcycle fatalities A study of 13,029 motorcyclists killed in nighttime crashes found that there were 5.3% more fatalities on nights with a full moon compared to other nights. The authors speculate that the increase might be due to visual distractions created by the moon, especially when it is near the horizon and appears abruptly between trees, around turns, etc. Stock market Several studies have argued that the stock market's average returns are much higher during the half of the month closest to the new moon than the half closest to the full moon. The reasons for this have not been studied, but the authors