Can Homicide Serve as an Indicator of Non-lethal Crime? A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Homicide rates are often used as an indicator of levels of crime. The reasons for this are both practical and conceptual. Practically speaking, homicide statistics tend to be more reliable than statistics for other forms of crime. Conceptually speaking, homicide and other forms of crime are often considered to be related: homicide is seen as the “tip of the iceberg” of underlying crime. However, it remains unclear whether this convention is empirically justifiable. Here, we review empirical evidence for the idea that homicide can serve as an indicator of crime more generally. We identify 31 previous studies that include information on this issue. Findings indicate that homicide is related to other forms of crime (particularly violent crimes) in larger scale, and cross-sectional analyses, but studies focusing on smaller levels of analysis identify substantial variation depending on location or time frame being considered. We conclude that homicide can function as an indicator of violent crime in general, but no clear pattern emerges as to what that means concretely. To those authors wishing to use homicide as an indicator of (violent) crime, we recommend that they conduct and report preliminary work to establish to what extent this notion is justified within the context and time frame on which they wish to focus.