American Homicide Research Articles

Disproportionate burden of violence: Explaining racial and ethnic disparities in potential years of life lost among homicide victims, suicide decedents, and homicide-suicide perpetrators.

Research indicates that the burden of violent death in the United States is disproportionate across racial and ethnic groups. Yet documented disparities in rates of violent death do not capture the full extent of this inequity. Recent studies examining race-specific rates of potential years of life lost-a summary measure of premature mortality-indicate that persons of color may die at younger ages than their counterparts, leading to increased trauma among surviving family members, friends, and communities. This study examines racial and ethnic disparities in potential years of life lost among people who died by homicide and suicide. We calculated potential years of life lost using life expectancy values specific to each racial and ethnic group, thereby isolating racial differences in potential years of life lost due to violence. Findings indicated that persons of color were disproportionately impacted by violence. Non-Hispanic African American homicide victims, suicide decedents, and homicide-suicide perpetrators died eleven or more years earlier than their non-Hispanic White counterparts. Similar disparities were observed for non-Hispanic Asian or Pacific Islander decedents. Less pronounced differences were observed for Hispanic and non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native decedents. These racial and ethnic disparities were partly accounted for by a broad array of individual differences, incident characteristics, and contextual factors. The results suggest that homicide and suicide exact a high societal cost, and the burden of that cost is disproportionately high among persons of color.

Examining the Relationship Between Weapon Type and Relationship Type in American Homicides: A Bayesian Approach

The weapon type used in a homicide predicts the victim-perpetrator relationship. However, there are some limitations in this past research including the common data analytic strategies. Our purpose was to build a model of weapon type, predicting relationship type, and to address previous limitations. We examined 363,927 homicides and used Bayesian multilevel categorical regression. In addition to analyzing weapon type (final model consisted of 16 weapon categories), we examined the victims’ sex, age, and race as covariates and modeled the data across states and counties. Results indicate that weapon type is highly informative, however, the age of the victim and sex of the victim interact in important ways.

Guns and Violence: Weapon Instrumentality in New Orleans Homicide, 1920–1945

Criminologists, sociologists, and public-health scholars have devoted enormous attention to the role of firearms in violence, particularly regarding American homicide rates, but historians have been less inclined to examine the impact of firearms, especially their availability, on changing patterns of violence. Instead, legal and criminal-justice historians have emphasized the ways in which institutional, cultural, political, and social changes have fueled shifts in levels of murder. An analysis of the rich homicide case files and newspaper accounts of gun violence in early twentieth-century New Orleans, however, confirms the theory of “weapon instrumentality”—that homicide rates tend to soar whenever and wherever firearms abound and to decrease when guns are in shorter supply.

Alcohol use and coping in a cross-sectional study of African American homicide survivors

The loss of a loved one to homicide is associated with considerable distress, often in the form of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and complicated grief (CG), and alcohol misuse. Yet alcohol-related problems and loss from a homicide are issues that disproportionally affect African Americans. The present study investigated alcohol use in a sample of 54 African American homicide survivors. Although there was a low prevalence of hazardous drinking, alcohol use was associated with higher levels of PTSD, complicated grief, and depression severity. In addition, scores on the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) were correlated with active emotional coping and avoidant emotional coping. In analyses of PTSD symptom clusters, emotional numbing and hyperarousal symptoms were significantly correlated with AUDIT total score.

Accomplishing Difference: How Do Anti-race/Ethnicity Bias Homicides Compare to Average Homicides in the United States?

Research on the nature of bias homicide has experienced increased interest in the academic literature. To date, few studies have compared the similarities and differences between anti-race/ethnicity bias homicides and average American homicides. Consequently, we know little about how the offender, victim, and situational characteristics compare across these two homicide types. Drawing from doing difference theory of bias crime, the aim of this study is to comparatively analyze the attributes of anti-race/ethnicity homicides to average homicides between 1990 and 2014. Anti-race/ethnicity homicide data is extracted from the U.S. Extremist Crime Database and paired with average homicides from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 2000 Supplementary Homicide Reports. The results of this study suggest that the characteristics of anti-race/ethnicity homicides are both similar and different from average homicides. Implications for bias crime theory, research, and policy are discussed.

American Homicide Exceptionalism

The instrumentality theory of homicide posits that Americans kill each other off at exceptionally high rates because the lethality of interpersonal violence is dictated by the lethality of the instrumentalities, specifically guns, at their disposal. This article argues that the instrumentality theory gets causation backwards and that the perpetrator theory, which asserts that homicides are mostly committed by people with deep personal histories of predatory crime and substance abuse, more accurately explains homicides.

“I Wouldn’t Be No Woman If I Wouldn’t Hit Him”: Race, Patriarchy, and Spousal Homicide in New Orleans, 1921–1945

Early-twentieth-century New Orleans was extraordinarily violent, and the city’s domestic homicide rate was particularly high. Remarkably rich sources for the period from 1921 to 1945 reveal distinct race- and gender-based levels and etiologies of spousal murder. Although challenges to patriarchal authority and men’s proprietary control triggered most of the violence, the African American partner homicide rate was seven times the white rate, and the African American women’s spousal homicide rate five times that of white men and a dozen times that of white women. These disparities reflected the interaction among race relations, gender ideals, and a series of neighborhood and institutional forces, which combined to reinforce masculine privilege in white families and destabilize household authority in African American families, resulting in divergent patterns of spousal murder.

Spiritual Distress in Bereavement: Evolution of a Research Program

Many mourners turn to their spiritual beliefs and traditions when confronted by the death of a loved one. However, prior studies have either focused primarily on the benefits of faith following loss or studied spiritual struggle outside the context of bereavement. Moreover, scales to measure bereavement-related crises of faith and interventions specifically designed for spiritually inclined, distressed grievers are virtually non-existent. Our program of research, which to date has consisted of working with Christian grievers and is outlined below, elucidates complicated spiritual grief (CSG)—a spiritual crisis following the loss of a loved one. For example, our longitudinal examination of 46 African American homicide survivors established the relation between positive religious coping, CSG, and complicated grief (CG), to clarify whether religious coping more strongly predicted bereavement distress or vice versa, with a follow-up study that determined the relation between religious coping and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. We replicated and expanded these findings with a diverse sample of 150 grievers to explore the complex relation between CSG, CG, and meaning making in a comparison study of mourners who had experienced traumatic-versus natural death losses. In a companion study, we qualitatively analyzed 84 grievers’ narratives and interviewed a 5-member focus group to capture and learn from their firsthand experiences of spiritual distress. To close the gap in terms of CSG assessment, we also developed and validated the Inventory of Complicated Spiritual Grief (ICSG). Currently, our ongoing CSG investigation extends in several directions: first, to a sample of family members anticipating the loss of their hospice-eligible loved one in palliative care; and, second, to the development and testing of a writing-intensive intervention for newly bereaved, spiritually inclined grievers.

Why are the Truly Disadvantaged American, When the UK is Bad Enough? A Political Economy Analysis of Local Autonomy in Criminal Justice, Education, Residential Zoning

In terms of key criminal justice indices such as the rate of the most serious violent crime and the imprisonment rate, the United States not only performs worse than other advanced democracies, but does so to a startling degree. Moreover these differences have become more extreme over the last half century. For example, the imprisonment rate, which was double that in England and Wales in 1970, is today five times higher, notwithstanding the fact that the rate in England and Wales has itself more than doubled during that period. And while, at between four and five times the English level, the American homicide rate is broadly comparable today with that in 1950 (when it was nearly six times the English level), it reached ten times that level in the late 1970s. These differences are widely recognised. What is less often recognised in comparative criminal justice scholarship is that these differences in criminal justice variables sit alongside stark differences in other key social indicators, notably in inequality of educational outcomes and in residential socio-economic and racial segregation, where the United States also does worse than other liberal market countries with similar economic and welfare systems. The comparison with other Liberal Market Economies such as the UK and New Zealand is even more striking in the light of their own poor performance on all these variables as compared to the Co-ordinated Market Economies of Northern Europe and Japan. In this paper, we present a thesis about what explains each of these distinctive American outcomes, and about how they relate to one another.

Conviction Odds in Chicago Homicide Cases: Does Race/Ethnicity Matter?

This study investigates disparity as it exists in the conviction of Latino, African American, and White offenders in Chicago homicide cases. The study participants were adults who had been identified by the Chicago Police Department as suspects in homicide incidents for the years 1990 through 1995. Information about the offender, victim, homicide incident, and adjudication of the homicide case in court was collected from police and court records. Logistic regression modeling was used to determine the odds of conviction for Latino, African American, and White homicide offenders at the adjudication decision point of criminal case processing. Results indicated that in Chicago homicide cases, when deciding guilt or no guilt for Class M Felony murder, neither race nor ethnicity mattered; what did matter the most was the offender–victim relationship, the number of charges filed against the offender, and the mode of conviction. This study continues the important tradition in racial and ethnic disparity studies of measuring the effect of offender–victim dyads on case outcomes. It builds on prior research in 2 ways: (a) by measuring the impact of the offender–victim dyad's race and ethnicity on conviction odds and (b) by expanding the scope of case-processing research through examining decision making at the pre-sentence adjudication stage, a point researchers have heretofore rarely examined.

Book Review: American Homicide

Book Review: American Homicide

Yes We Can: Working Together toward a History of Homicide that is Empirically, Mathematically, and Theoretically Sound

I would like to thank the Editorial Board of Crime, History, and Societies for giving Pieter Spierenburg and me an opportunity to discuss my book, American Homicide. As I anticipated, Pieter’s essay is an aggressive defense of the “civilization” thesis of Norbert Elias, a thesis which Pieter has advanced in creative ways. At the end of my essay, I will suggest ways in which my findings on the history of homicide are compatible and incompatible with Pieter and Elias’s thesis. Before I do, howe...

American Homicide1. What Does the Evidence Mean for Theories of Violence and Society?

Randolph Roth’s American Homicide is an impressive book which has been long awaited among specialists in historical violence. It is based on an enormous research effort matched only by the amount of reading in secondary literature that has gone into this study. Even historians disagreeing with Roth’s overall thesis will learn much about American history or, for example about the character and circumstances of intimate homicide. All in all, his quantitative evidence, covering much of the terri...

Faith in the Wake of Homicide: Religious Coping and Bereavement Distress in an African American Sample

Mourners often rely on faith following loss, but not all find spirituality comforting. Some grievers engage in negative religious coping (NRC), signaled by behaviors and thoughts such as anger toward God or their faith community, feeling spiritually abandoned, or questioning God's power. Our longitudinal study of 46 African American homicide survivors explored the relation of both positive religious coping (PRC) and NRC to complicated grief (CG) and investigated whether religious coping more strongly predicted psychological distress or vice versa. Results indicated that NRC was associated with CG, whereas PRC was substantially unrelated to bereavement outcome. Significantly, CG prospectively predicted high levels of spiritual struggle 6 months later, both in terms of CG and NRC composite scores and at the individual-item level. Clinical implications regarding spiritually sensitive interventions are noted.

Complicated Grief in the Aftermath of Homicide: Spiritual Crisis and Distress in an African American Sample

Both grieving the loss of a loved one and using spirituality or religion as an aid in doing so are common behaviors in the wake of death. This longitudinal examination of 46 African American homicide survivors follows up on our earlier study that established the relation between positive and negative religious coping on the one hand and complicated grief (CG) on the other. In the current report, we broadened this focus to determine the relation between religious coping and other bereavement outcomes, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression, to establish whether religious coping more strongly predicted bereavement distress or vice versa. We also sought to determine if the predictive power of CG in terms of religious coping over time exceeded that of PTSD and depression. Our results suggested a link between negative religious coping (NRC) and all forms of bereavement distress, whereas no such link was found between positive religious coping (PRC) and bereavement outcomes in our final analyses. Significantly, only CG prospectively predicted high levels of spiritual struggle six months later. Clinical implications regarding spiritually sensitive interventions are noted.

American Homicide (review)

American Homicide (review)

American Homicide. By Randolph Roth (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University, 2009) 655 pp. $45.00

<i>American Homicide.</i> By Randolph Roth (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University, 2009) 655 pp. $45.00

American homicide

American homicide

African American Homicide Bereavement: Aspects of Social Support That Predict Complicated Grief, PTSD, and Depression

Psychological adaptation following homicide loss is challenged not only by the violent nature of the death itself but also by the bereaved's relationships with would-be supporters. Recruiting a sample of 54 African-American homicidally bereaved individuals, we examined perceived and actual support, the size of the support network, family versus non-family support, and number of negative relationships to gauge the role of social support in bereavement outcomes such as complicated grief, PTSD, and depression. Results of quantitative assessments revealed that size of available network, quantity of negative relationships, and levels of grief-specific support were correlated with bereavement outcome. Clinical implications and suggestions for future research on the role of social support in adaptation of African Americans to traumatic loss are discussed.

Structure, Culture, and Lethality: An Integrated Model Approach to American Indian Suicide and Homicide

Investigations of lethal violence in the United States have primarily focused on Whites and/or African Americans, generally ignoring American Indians. Interestingly, statistics indicate that homicide and suicide rates among American Indians are often higher than other racial/ethnic groups within the United States. In an attempt to understand these lethal violence patterns, the current study utilizes the integrated model of suicide and homicide to investigate the structural and cultural factors that contribute to the production and/or direction of American Indian lethal violence. Using data from the Indian Health Service, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the U.S. Census Bureau, a modified lethal violence count (LVC) is used to examine the production of lethal violence among American Indians within U.S. counties as well as the suicide—homicide ratio (SHR) to unravel the etiological underpinnings of lethal violence. Findings indicate partial support for the integrated model with economic conditions and family disruption influencing these patterns of lethal violence.