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Tom Givens
05-22-2014, 02:17 PM
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.
www.rangemaster.com

Jay Cunningham
05-23-2014, 07:37 AM
Thanks much Tom for this *most useful* information.

ford.304
05-23-2014, 08:16 AM
Very interesting.

I had thought other research I had seen linked a high percent of murders as at least tangentially drug related, even if it wasn't clearly gang-related. But then, many times when you see those statistics they mean one guy had some weed in his pocket when he got jumped, which isn't exactly the same thing.

JodyH
05-23-2014, 09:46 AM
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.
I would think that there are a lot of murders classified as "felony", "other" and "unknown" that are gang related but just not classified as such.
I know that around here we get a lot of "unknown" because the suspected perpetrator skips out to Mexico never to be seen again, but the general consensus among the dead guys friends is it was a cartel hit for a drug/money ripoff or similar.
They can't officially classify it as anything else until it's adjudicated (which is often never).

Rosco Benson
05-23-2014, 11:35 AM
The fact that the data covers a 29 year period might be significant in gang related murders being less than one would think. Over the last decade or so, I've seen an ever increasing effort by law enforcement and corrections to identify and catalog gang affiliations. Prior to that, little effort was made to identify these connections (at least in Ohio).

Rosco

Chuck Haggard
05-24-2014, 07:07 AM
20-25 years ago our then Chiefs would staunchly disagree with any claims that we had a gang problem, or gangs at all, in our area.

Just an observation.

LSP552
05-24-2014, 08:25 AM
20-25 years ago our then Chiefs would staunchly disagree with any claims that we had a gang problem, or gangs at all, in our area.

Just an observation.

Sad to say Chuck, but that's not unusual nor is it limited to 20 years ago.

Ken

KeeFus
05-24-2014, 08:40 AM
Sad to say Chuck, but that's not unusual nor is it limited to 20 years ago.

Ken

Nope. Daily battle.

Stengun
05-29-2014, 10:56 PM
Howdy Tom,

There's a couple of "tactical errors" in your post.

Not with what you posted or how it was posted but with the original data that was published by the DOJ.

For example:

Take Little Rock, AR. From 1990 to 2000 LR was the murder capital of the USA 9 out of 11 years. Heck, HBO even did a special about LR called "Bangin' in the Hood".

After 2000 LR's homicide rate went WAAAAAAY down.

Fewer murders?

Nope.

How you ask? Simple. LR started recording homicides using the same method that other cities were using. Here's how it works:

Someone calls 9-1-1 and reports a body on the sidewalk. LRPD responses and after finding a body with multiple GSWs ask if anyone saw or heard anything. Everyone replies "We ain't seen shitte!"

LRPD reports the cause of death as "unknown" and goes into the stats same as if the body had died of a heart attack, lung cancer, old age, etc.

Two years later LRPD arrests and convicts someone for killing the body they had found that had died from "unknown" causes but they never go back and change the stats with the DOJ.

Some cities and counties have been doing this for many years but LR was just late to the party.

Paul

Threefeathers
06-10-2014, 07:18 PM
Hey Tom, I love to read the real stats from you and Mas. Course 4 months ago I was almost one of them. ;)

Salamander
06-10-2014, 11:38 PM
Then there's the problem of how to classify a given crime when there are multiple possible choices.

I'm in a pretty small place, 134,000 in the county, about 30,000 in the largest local city. I can't find murder numbers for the entire county right now, but anything in double digits is a bad year, and the numbers I just looked at for the city range from one to five per year from 2000-2012. So it's pretty easy to keep track of just reading the paper and/or the local blogs.

In the more rural/remote areas murders are often drug related, since we're in the emerald triangle and it's not all that unusual for one low-life to try to rip off another. In town it's more complex. There's a case on trial right now which is generally billed as guy gropes girl, other guys take guy out in alley and beat him up, first guy comes back a few days later with a gun and allegedly kills the two guys who beat him up and the girl who rejected him.

But then it turns out that the prosecution is struggling because all the witnesses are junkies, and they don't remember things so well and tend to contradict each other. So... is it a reasonable assumption that the alleged killer and/or the victims may also have been junkies, or not? (that's been hinted but I don't think verified, at least publicly). Is it drug related, or not?

The Oldtown area where my office is has a local rep of being a relatively high crime area and for sure it really does have a concentration of homeless. To me, as an inner-city boy for most of my life, it feels pretty safe. There were more murders in my old neighborhood on a typical hot summer weekend than in this whole county in a year. Yet the folks who were born here are often afraid. We see the same numbers. So which perception is "accurate?"

I work right across the street from the courthouse and park right next to the prosecutor (for this case) on some days, and I can say that today she looked like she had a rough day.

ford.304
06-11-2014, 10:37 AM
@StenGun

Is there a name for this phenomenon? I seem to see it all the time.

Front page news on Monday: Cities are cooking the books on crime/test scores/reported income.

Front page news on Friday: New study shows that crime statistics/test scores/income is improving! This shows that (author's preferred social theory/program) is correct!

But no one bats an eye...