Homicide Trends
The US Department of Justice gathers and reports information on a number of crime classifications from all over the United States. They recently released a huge amount of data on homicides occurring during the time period 1976-2005. This is a 29 year period, so there was a lot of data to examine. Here are a few tidbits from that information.
Males are almost four times as likely to be murdered as females. Males are
also far more likely to be the offender.
Among male victims, they were killed by:
Spouse, ex-spouse, or girlfriend 5%
Other family member 6.8%
Acquaintance/known person 35.3%
Stanger or unknown killer 52.9%
Among female victims, they were killed by:
Spouse, ex-spouse, boyfriend 30%
Other family member 11.8%
Acquaintance/ known person 21.8%
Stranger/unknown 36.3%
Cases involving:
male offender/ male victim 65.3%
male offender/female victim 22.7%
female offender/male victim 9.6%
female offender/female victim 2.4%
Age of victims:
Under 18 9.8%
18-34 52.7%
35-49 22.8%
50+ 14.7%
Circumstances of murder, 2005 only:
Felony murder* 2,432 15%
Argument 4,787
Gang related 955 5.7%
Other ** 2,223
Unknown ** 6,295
Felony murder is a murder committed during the commission of some other
felony, such as armed robbery, car-jacking, rape, etc.
“Other” and “Unknown” accounted for 51% of all homicides. “Other”,
“Unknown” and “Felony Murder” together comprised 66% (2 out of 3) of these homicides. These are the ones we go armed to prevent.
Please note that gang related murders were the smallest percentage. The common notion that most murders are gang members killing each other is nonsense.
A couple of other quick facts:
Each year about 4,400 unidentified human bodies are recovered in the US.
About 1,000 remain unidentified after one year. At any given time, there are
approximately 100,000 active missing person cases in the US. Many of these are soon found, as they are voluntary disappearances due to marital discord, domestic violence, credit issues, etc. However, several thousand each year disappear without a trace and are never seen again. Obviously, these are undetected homicides that add to the data detailed above.
Other Violent Crime
These figures are also from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a branch of the
US Department of Justice. These deal specifically with 2006.
Total Violent Crime Incidents for 2006 = 5,685,620 (1 for every 54 people)
A common fallacy is that this violent crime takes place in the wee hours, after midnight. Wrong!
6 am-6 pm 52.4% 6 pm-midnight 32.8% midnight-6 am 10.9%
Robbery = 645,950 with injury to the victim= 232,380
Rape = 255,630 Victim’s advocacy groups believe about 1 rape out of every 6 is reported to the police. Do the math.
Aggravated Assault = 1,209,730 (an assault involving a deadly weapon and/or serious bodily injury to the victim) Many Aggravated Assault victims are permanently disabled, have to have multiple surgeries, or are permanently disfigured, they just didn’t die and become homicides.
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Originally Posted by Chuck Haggard
