Number Of Murders Research Articles

How Dangerous are Gun Owners?

Every night, the police check all licensed firearms owners. As if that was not enough, the RCMP encourages officers to check before attending a call to see if anyone has a firearms licence at their destination. Licence information is made readily available on the Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC) virtually without restriction through the portal to the Canadian Firearms Registry Online (CFRO). As I reported to Parliament, Canadians who have a firearms licence are less than one-third as likely to commit murder as other Canadians (Mauser 2012). This paper examines police killings specifically to discover the number of murderers who hold a firearms licence. Analyzing a Special Request to Statistics Canada that reported the number of police officers who were victims of firearm-related homicide between 1997 and 2013. Unsurprisingly, the bulk of police-officer shootings involved illegal firearms (15 out of 18). Comparing PAL holders with the general Canadian population shows that PAL holders pose approximately the same level of threat to police as the typical Canadian.

Land reform and violence: Evidence from Mexico

We document the connection between land reform and violent crime in Mexico using the counter-reform carried out in 1992 that liberalised the ejido sector. Using data at municipality level, we exploit the fact that municipalities have different exposure to the reform. We report a significant impact of the land reform on the number of murders: in those municipalities with a higher proportion of social land, and therefore more exposed to the land reform, the number of murders decreased more than in those municipalities less exposed to the land reform. Our results suggest that clearly specified and consistently enforced land rights reduce gains from violence, leading therefore to lower levels of violence, as measured by the number of murders.

Use of Different Murder Weapons by a Single Murderer: Two Case Reports

Homicide is an extremely serious crime, and although the offender usually uses the same weapon to initially injure and complete the killing, there are exceptions. We report two cases in which a single murderer killed a victim using different weapons and summarize several situations in which a murderer might use different weapons to kill. The number of murders should be determined and estimated after a comprehensive complicated investigation of the scene, careful examination of the victim's injuries, and evaluation of evidence reported by eyewitnesses.

The Influence of Macroeconomic Variables on Health Indices, Murder and Mortality: A Case of Jamaica

Background: A paucity of information exists in the literature that has seen a single study modeling macroeconomic indicators, murder and health indices (i.e., illness rate, health insurance coverage, health care utilization and mortality) in the English-speaking Caribbean. The current paper fills the gap in the literature. Objective: This paper examines how selected macroeconomic variables influence murder, mortality and illhealth. Methods: The data for this study are taken from publications of different governmental organizations, responsible for the collection of pertinent data for the government to carry out policy planning. Ordinary least square regression analyses were used to establish the model for 1) mortality, 2) murder and 3) ill-health. Results: There is a fluctuation of murder rates between the decades in the study period as evidenced by the fact that the average number of murders in Jamaica between 1969 and 1981 was 266. The following decade (1980-1989) saw an 85.3% increase, which subsequently saw a 43.4% reduction by the third decade of the study period (1990-1999). The last decade (2000-2009) saw a 93.5% increase in murders. For the studied period, there was a geometric progression in murders compared to a cyclical change in mortality. There was a strong correlation between murder and health insurance coverage (rs=0.960; P=0.0001), inflation (rs=-0.861; P=0.0001), exchange rate (rs=0.950; P=0.0001); a moderate relationship between mortality and health care utilization (rs=0.654; P=0.001) and no bivariate relationship existed between murder and illness (rs=-0.411, P=0.090). Conclusion: The reality is government should have a coherent policy in place to address these events, as every life lost through murder is important and represents a reduction in potential contribution to economic growth and development.

“So Many Stars that Yell Above and None Is Seen”

Urban violence enters into, and creates interstices in both public and private life of Venezuelans and, as revealed by academic studies to the mass media, has made Caracas one of the most chaotic and unsafe cities in the world by the number of murders, robberies, and kidnappings, with latent cultural anxiety (Martin‑Barbero), in which the majority of its inhabitants lives. Hence that is drawn around an imaginary, in some cases established by their own players. In this paper, we will seek an approach to urban violence, emphasizing the dynamics of new forms of representation, and the emergence of alternative discourses of hegemony, which set up a fresh look on it.

Medicolegal characteristics of homicides in Belgrade population

OBJECTIVE. Homicide is a destruction of human life, and it essentially conditioned by socio-economic situation in the society. The aim of this study is to analyze the frequency and other significant epidemiological and medicolegal characteristics of homicides in the population of Belgrade. METHODS. An analysis was performed of all homicide cases in which autopsies were performed at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Belgrade from 2003. to 2005. Data were obtained by using the autopsy records, the investigation reports, the heteroanamnesis obtained from family members of the fatally injured persons and the results of chemical toxicological analysis. RESULTS. There were a total of 143 cases of autopsies of homicide victims. The majority of victims were males (103 or 72.03%) aged from 21 to 30 (25.17%). Homicides were mostly performed by using mechanical weapons only (127 or 88.8%). In most of the cases five or more injuries were registered per victim (48 victims or 33.57%) or only one injury (52 or 36.36%). Most of entrance wounds were located on the anterior side of the body. CONCLUSION. We demonstrated a gradual decrease in the number of murders in our population, and therefore we can expect a decrease in the absolute number of homicides in the future. Keywords homicide; male; firearms; multiple trauma; forensic medicine Language: sr

Murder and ill-health: A health crime phenomenon

Introduction: The annual numbers of murders in Jamaica are more than the number of deaths by HIV and relatively close to those mortalities by diabetes mellitus. On average between 1988 and 2011, there were 1, 042 cases of murders, with 2009 being the murderous year in the nation’s history (1,680 cases). Although the murder statistics read like many non-communicable diseases, there is limited literature on health crimes. Objectives: This paper 1) examines the bivariate correlation between ill-health and murder, 2) models ill-health over the last 21 years, 3) establishes a function of murder, 4) determines a best fit model for ill-health and murders in Jamaica from 1989-to-2010, 5) commences literature on health crimes, 6) aids policy specialists to formulate the research driven policies based on the findings, and 7) the influence of GDP, unemployment and murders on illness rates. Methods: Using data collated from Government of Jamaica Publications on murders and illness rates from 1989-to-2010, this work used SPSS to examine objectives 1 through 5. Results: The relationship between illness rate and murder is a non-linear one, which is fitted by a 3 degree polynomial. Conclusions: The causes, consequences and challenges of murders extend to ill-health. The opportunity costs of murder constitute the lost production, creativity, social contribution and scientific discovery that the society must forego because of the termination of the human life as well as the current burden of health conditions among the living that arise in the aftermath of a murder.

The Call of the Wild: Speculations on a White Counterlife in South Africa

If whiteness is a condition which has historically found its (moving) focus in a dialectic with wildness - as I have proposed elsewhere - then the first point one should observe is that the term 'whiteness' as a sign should be seen as a trace and not an essence. This is a key qualification, at the outset, as it sets my project apart from any sense that it is possible easily or fully to capture and contain a category description as referentially fractured as 'whiteness.' By contrast, an acknowledgment that any installation of a referent must be regarded as provisional and potentially complicit in the process of erasure, paradoxically affords one a greater play of nuance and variation, a bigger range of potential meaning. For surely, in a context of heterogeneity as marked as that in southern Africa, the signifier 'whiteness' (along with all its proxy signifiers), despite equally persistent tropes of sameness and rock-solid marks of identity, must be regarded as a shuttling moniker, a hot potato variously juggled and differently handled, grasped, welcomed or rendered problematic across time and space. Otherwise we might find ourselves unwillingly repeating the naming game of the nineteenth, as well as the twentieth century, when the word 'Kaffir' (or 'Kafir') was similarly homogenised to the detriment, precisely, of nuance, variation and difference. The hypostasis entailed in the naming, throughout the nineteenth century, of a vast array of human specificity under the term 'Kaffir,' an act of epistemological violence against difference in the historical, cultural and ethnological sense, and against differance in the poststructuralist sense, created not only a stunted and sorry scene of intercultural embattlement along the South African 'frontier' (in my terms, the 'seam'), but it was also literally inscribed in blood, in the untold number of murders done in its name, its essentialising will to power.

Scenes of Love and Murder: Renoir, Film and Philosophy

The two canonical views of perhaps the greatest of French film-makers construct him as, on the one hand, the cinematic auteur par excellence and, on the other, the supreme exponent of pre-Second War cinéma engagé. The great merit of Colin Davis's elegantly written and provocative study is that it goes beyond these approaches without dismissing or disregarding them, in — appropriately for a work whose remit and grounding are explicitly philosophical — a kind of Aufhebung which finds in the work of one not generally regarded as a conceptual film-maker (unlike Godard or even Abel Gance) nothing less than a reflection on and of the constitutive unreliability and undecidability of cinema itself. The view of Renoir as jovial humanist is surely given its coup de grâce by the fact that there are, as Davis reminds us, a considerable number of murders in his work — indeed all the major 1930s films bar Une partie de campagne feature at least one violent death, a strike-rate almost on a par with that of his apparent opposite Hitchcock, with whom suggestive comparisons are here made. Davis's intertextual breviary draws not only on the ‘usual suspects’ Žižek and Deleuze, but also on Stanley Cavell's ‘philosophical hermeneutics of film’ (p. 17) and even, apropos La Grande Illusion, Aristotle's ethics of friendship as revisited by Derrida. This might seem to portend a downplaying of mise-en-scène and a deployment of films as exemplars to illustrate philosophical arguments — something which Davis not unfairly points out underpins much of Deleuze's Cinéma — but in fact his visual analyses are pertinent and incisive, as with the analysis of doorways and framing in La Chienne or that of La Règle du jeu's omnipresent theatricality and the consistent inconsistency of the perspectives it thereby offers the spectator. There are moments of possible imprecision in some points of detail; thus, to describe Batala in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange as the eponymous hero's ‘model’ perhaps imputes a degree too much self-consciousness to Lange, for whom Batala is rather frère ennemi or even Big Other, while to see woman-as-subject as foreclosed from La Marseillaise bizarrely omits any consideration of the inspiring speech given by a Republican fishwife to the Marseille Republican Convention, denouncing the killing of her lover — for me one of the highspots of the film. Overall, however, the book represents both a major contribution to the interrogation of the relationship between philosophy and film and a significant addition to work on an œuvre wherein the uncanny looms at least as large as the humanistic or the committed which it unremittingly shadows. The elegant presentation, good selection of illustrations, and handy guide to Renoir's 1930s films presented as an appendix will make this a valuable text for undergraduate students of the director as well as for postgraduate scholars and faculty.

Polish Partisan Formations during 1942–1944 in Jewish Testimonies

This article aims to present the picture of Polish partisans in the accounts of Jewish survivors, based on materials from the Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute. This texts discusses the following Polish underground military formations: the Home Army, Peasants' Battalions, socialist armed groups, the National Armed Forces and the People's Guard /Army (GL/AL). In her discussion of pro-independence armed formations, the author emphasises. the feeling of danger still present in those accounts, fear of death even from the partisans. The accounts mention a number of murders as well as difficulties Jews encountered when they wanted to join partisan outfits, not to mention refusals of co-operation from Poles. Testimonies about GL/AL differ from previous ones by their “insider” perspective, as most of them come from Jews, GL partisans. Perhaps that is why they are dominated by a favourable picture of communist partisans, even though several accounts mention conflicts between the commanders and the Jewish GL partisan outfits

Imposing a Cap on Capital Punishment: A Proposal for Minimizing the Arbitrariness of the Death Penalty

Over the last three decades, the Supreme Court has established complex procedural safeguards in an effort to reduce the arbitrariness of the death penalty. Despite the Court's considerable efforts however, capital punishment is still imposed in an arbitrary fashion. One reason for the continued arbitrariness is that the Court's efforts have focused almost exclusively on the guilt and sentencing phases of capital trials, while imposing few barriers limiting which capital cases are input into the criminal justice system in the first place. Because there are few legal constraints on the sheer number of cases in which prosecutors can pursue the death penalty, the Government is not under sufficient pressure to choose its capital cases carefully. As a result, the death penalty is sought and meted out in some cases, which though terrible, are no worse than the thousands of other murder cases in which prosecutors pursue only life imprisonment. Moreover, because prosecutors in certain jurisdictions file too many capital cases, the criminal justice system lacks the resources to focus sufficient attention on each one. This paper argues that the Court would be better served by imposing a cap on the number of death-penalty prosecutions each jurisdiction can bring in a given year. The cap would be based on the number of murders in a given jurisdiction and the national average of death-penalty prosecutions each year. Such a cap would bring outlying jurisdictions into the mainstream, rather than allowing those counties to seek the ultimate punishment in an excessive number of cases. This paper argues that a cap on death-penalty prosecutions would be more likely to reduce the arbitrariness of capital punishment and would be no more activist than the Court's current death-penalty jurisprudence.

Media, Evil and Society. Media Use and its Impacts on Crime Perception, Sentencing Attitudes and Crime Policy

ln democratic societies, crime policy and its management by parliaments and ministries largely depends on trends in crime. If, over a prolonged period. the media report strong upward trends in the number of crimes committed and if the public clebate on crime focuses on spectacular, serious crimes, policymakers come under heavy pressure to increase statutory punishments and tighten the rules of procedure for criminal prosecutions. The courts in turn feel bound to hand out tougher sentences – passed in the name of the people, their judgements are meant to reflect public opinion. The question thus arises as to whether long periods of either dwindling or stable crime figures allow policymakers and the courts to soften punishments for specific offences and to place, for example, the notion of offender-victim compensation and offender resocialisation at the forefront. There is thus every reason to raise awareness of the relationship between the media and the perceptions of crime. The German Police Crime Statistics for the last 10 years indicate a strong downward trend in the number of crimes that people perceive as very threatening or generally worrying. There has been a 45 percent reduction both in the number of break-ins in private homes and in bank robberies. In the past l0 years, the number of murders has dropped by around 41 percent. Car thefts are down by as much as 70 percent. While other offences like fraud have increased, there has been a slight overall reduction in the number of crimes recorded since 1993. In the light of our ageing society, this hardly comes as a surprise. In the past decade, the 18 to 30 age group - a group which in 1993, for example, made up almost half of all crime suspects - has shrunk from 9.4 to 7 percent of the population. Conversely, there has been a strong increase (from 20.4 to 24.4 percent) in the numer of people aged 60 and over a group that accounts for less than 3 percent of all violent crime suspects. Germany's ageing society is evidently good for domestic security. Another significant preventive effect is the stabillsation in migration since 1993. Positive trends of the type indicated for the last 10 years can, of course, only influence crime policy if they shape the public debate on crime and are made known to a broad majority of the population. But this is not always the case. Whether or not crime is on the increase or the decrease is not usually something most people are aware of. Unlike the rise and fall of fuel prices that we can all observe at local filling stations, crime is a social phenomenon that often happens out of public view. Even when crime occurs in public, say graffiti spraying on the walls of buildings, drug dealing in open spaces, and mass hooliganism among drunken football fans, even those who regularly observe such events can at best estimate their frequency based on the world they see. The limited geographical scope of their personal experience does not allow them to make a reliable assessment of trends in the occurrence and the gravity of such offences. This is certainly the case as regards serious crimes that occur less frequently. In assessing the situation, members of the general public must rely entirely on what is reported by the mass media. The question arises, therefore, as to how people perceive current trends in crime and what role the media play in influencing their judgement.

Social Changes in Today's Russia Seen through the Crime Statistics

Crimes are mirrors of society. This article analyzes the contents of the Russian criminal statistics that began to be released to the public from the end of the Soviet era and examines the changes of the Russian society behind the crimes.There are three particular periods when crimes in Russia rapidly increased from 1982 to 2002. The first period is 1983, one year after the general secretary Brezhnev died. In 1983, the number of thefts remarkably increased, but the increase rate is not as prominent as the other two periods. The second period is 1989-1992, before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the number of crimes increased because morality and social order collapsed due to the following: introduction and expansion of the market economy, the social maladaptation of the returned soldiers from Afghanistan, and the confusion brought by the collapse of the Soviet Union. From 1989 to 1992, atrocious crimes such as murders, rapes and robberies especially increased. The third period is 1998-1999. The financial crisis in 1998 deprived millions of people of their savings and wages. From 1998 to 1999, the number of robberies, thefts and drug-related crimes increased. After Putin was officially elected as president of Russia in 2000, however, the crime rate increase slowed and, crimes started to reduce in number in 2002.Today the most serious crimes are crimes related to drugs, psychotropic medicines and deadly poisons. Drugs such as heroin and poppy seeds come to Russia mainly from Afghanistan and Tadzhikistan through Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz and Turkmenistan, and the part of them flows out to Ukraine and Western Europe. Drugs are expanding to smaller cities in Russia, not to mention the large cities. A large number of crimes, including drug-related crimes, are rapidly increasing in Khabarovsk, Tyumen', Ekaterinburg, Irkutsk, Kaliningrad, Novosibirsk, and so on. Of late, the number of crimes in Moscow is more than that in Sankt-Peterburk. Behind that, there exist movements of Russian Mafias.The unemployment rate rose after the collapse of the Soviet Union and became the highest in 1998 (13.2%) . The number of crimes, criminals and prisoners increased in proportion to the unemployment rate. Moreover, the number of crimes caused by the unemployed especially increased. This phenomenon, of course, was related to the economic conditions behind it. Among the young, those who don't go to school and have no job, increased in number and they tend to commit crimes such as robberies and thefts. In 2002, the number of crimes in Russia reduced a little, but the number of murders and drug-related crimes were larger, and the number of thefts were smaller compared to America, Japan, Britain, France and Germany. It seems that a large amount of illegal drugs flows underground in Russia.Now not only does the Russian government have to reinforce anticrime and anti-Mafia measures, but also have to reinforce the redistribution of wealth for the week, to promote national welfare, to regulate corruption of government officials and to promote tax collection in order to reduce the number of crimes. To do so, first of all, the government must further develop the economy and accumulate wealth.

The changing nature of murder in Russia

The death rate from homicide in Russia increased rapidly during the 1990s. It is now about 20 times higher than in western Europe and is among the highest recorded anywhere in the world. However, this issue has received little attention so far from public health researchers or policymakers. This paper describes the changing nature of homicide during the 1990s in Russia as a whole and, in more detail, in the Udmurt Republic. The study uses data from three sources: routine mortality data for Russia from 1970 to 1999; statistics on criminal investigations and convictions in Russia between 1990 and 1997; and an in-depth study of homicide trial records in the Udmurt Republic in 1989–1991 and 1998. Deaths from homicide increased between 1970 and 1985, falling slightly during the 1985 anti-alcohol campaign and then resuming their increase until 1994. Another fall in the late 1990s was arrested in 1998, with an increase in 1999. By 1999 the age standardised homicide death rate in Russia was 81% higher than in 1990, an increase almost twice that of all causes of death combined. Throughout the 1990s about 10% of those convicted of homicide were female. Of those homicides leading to convictions in the Udmurt Republic, 71% of those killed by males were male, as were 76% of those killed by females. Killings of women by men often involved sexual assaults. In Russia as a whole, about 80% of those convicted of homicide were reported to be under the influence of alcohol at the time. In the Udmurt Republic, where data on both offender and victim were available, victims were also commonly intoxicated. The nature of homicide in Russia has changed considerably in less than a decade, with many more now involving aggravating circumstances, such as murder to conceal another crime, in association with robbery or rape, or by a group of people. Although still a small proportion of the total convicted, the number of murders by hired killers is also on the rise. The characteristics of those convicted of homicide have also changed during the 1990s. They are now younger, less likely to have previous convictions, and to have a more diverse range of educational levels. The previous urban–rural gap, with higher levels in rural areas, has also narrowed.

The Alarming Number of Murders on Black College Campuses

The Alarming Number of Murders on Black College Campuses

The concept of community: implications for community care.

The Griffiths' report (DoH 1989) and the NHS and Community Care Act (1990) led to the closure of many psychiatric hospitals and many people with mental health problems being cared for in the community. An increase in the number of murders and suicides has been reported among seriously mentally ill people living in the community (RCP 1996).

The Origins of Gun Culture in the United States, 1760-1865

An astoundingly high level of personal violence separates the United States from every other industrial nation. In 1993, when the number of murders in Canada reached a high of 630, the United States (with nearly ten times the population) experienced 24,526 murders, out of a total of nearly two million violent crimes. The weapon of choice in 69.6 percent of those murders was a gun, and thousands more are killed by firearms every year in accidents and suicides.1 More people are killed with guns in the United States in a typical week than in all of western Europe in a year. It is now thought normal and appropriate for American urban elementary schools to use metal detectors to check students for firearms. We are familiar with the manifestations of American gun culture; the sincere love and affection with which our society views its weapons pours forth daily from the television and movie screens. Every form of the media reinforces the notion that the solution to your problems can be held in your hand and provide immediate gratification. Since the United States does not register guns, we have no idea how many there are or who actually buys them. The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) estimates that there are 250 million firearms in private hands; an additional 5 million are purchased every year. The National Sporting Goods Association estimates that 92 percent of all rifles are bought by men (94 percent of the shotguns). Most of those men fall into the 25to 34-year-old age group, make between $35,000 and $50,000 annually, and do not need to kill animals for their survival.2 The consequence of this culture is also very familiar. To select just a few more statistics as indicators: The chief of police and mayor of New York City were nearly euphoric that the number of murders in the city dropped below two thousand (to 1,995) in 1993; it reached a contemporary low of 1,581 in 1994. Yet the total

Social Hierarchy and the Death Penalty: A Social Dominance Perspective

This study examines the social factors related to use of the death penalty. In Study 1, the number of executions in each of the 50 states of the United States since 1976 was predicted from: (1) degree of social hierarchy, (2) Old Confederacy status, (3) political conservatism, (4) degree of violent crime, (5) income, (6) population size, (7) population density, (8) degree of education, (9) proportion of population which is white, and (10) proportion of whites murdered. Social hierarchy and conservatism were consistently and significantly related to use of executions. Study 2 predicted execution use in 147 countries from: (1) degree of social hierarchy, (2) number of murders, (3) size of government, (4) area, (5) education, (6) gross national product, and (7) population size. The degree of social hierarchy and number of murders were significantly related to execution use. While some of these results were predicted by the symbolic motives model or the deterrence model, it is argued that social dominance theory offers a more comprehensive explanation of the results as a whole.

Chicken kills hawk: gay murders during the eighties in Amsterdam.

A relatively large number of murders in Amsterdam are of older homosexual men. Police records and personality reports by social workers for the decade of the 1980s were investigated and interviews of "potential victims" were conducted in order to study why the crimes were committed. It was found that the murderers were mostly young male prostitutes. The evidence suggests that the motive for such crimes is usually complex and is influenced by the marginal social situation of the two groups involved, in which the lack of emotional and financial support plays a large role.

The deterrent effect of executions on homicide.

Lester (1979) studied the states of the USA from 1930 to 1967 and found that, if a state executed one or more persons in a given year, those states were more likely to show a decrease in the number of homicides for the following year than if no one were executed in the state. Graves (1956) monthly data on the number of executions in California from 1946 to 1955 and the number of murders in three California counties, which permits a monthly analysis. Analysis of Graves' data show that for the 64 mo. in which there were no executions, a decrease in the number of homicides occurred for 32 (50%) of the months. For the 51 months in which there was at least one execution, there was a decrease in the number of homicides in the following month for 31 (61%) of the months ( X , 2 = 1.33, p = .25). Four months were followed by no change in the number of homicides. Although the results of these analyses are in the direction of a deterrent effect from executions, the effect is not statistically significant.