Supplementary Homicide Reports Research Articles

Do Sheriff-Coroners Underreport Officer-Involved Homicides?

In the United States, each state sets its own standards for its death investigation system. These may require independent medical examiners and coroners or allow for the sheriff to assume the role of coroner. Motivated by the well-established fact that counts of officer-involved homicides in official data sets grossly undercount the number of these incidents, we examine the possibility that different death investigation systems may lead to different death classification outcomes. To examine the potential differences in officer-involved homicide underreporting by presence of sheriff-coroner and violent death type (gunshot, intentional use of force, pursuit, or other vehicle accident), we compare ratios of incidents from both the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Supplementary Homicide Reports and the restricted Multiple-Cause of Death files from the National Vital Statistics System to the Fatal Encounters data across coroner contexts in California between 2000 and 2018; we quantify differences descriptively and examine bivariate tests of means. We find significantly greater underreporting of officer-involved deaths in sheriff-coroner counties in both official data sets for all incidents compared with non-sheriff-coroner counties, independently of the period considered. These underreporting differences in the National Vital Statistics System are robust to restricting to gunshot and intentional use of force deaths, the type of incident expected to be less prone to misclassification in that data set. Officer-involved death underreporting in sheriff-coroner counties necessitates further scrutiny. Disparities in officer-involved death reporting suggest political pressure may play a role in classifying deaths.

Racialized Backlash: A State-Level Analysis of Black Women’s Homicide Victimization by Black Men, White Men, and Police

Violence against Black women has been overshadowed by gender-based violence against white women and police violence against Black men. We account for how the intersection of racism and sexism produce unique vulnerabilities for Black women in our examination of their homicide victimization committed by Black and white men (Supplementary Homicide Reports, 1986–2019) and by police (Fatal Encounters, 2000–2019). As predicted, analyses show curvilinear relationships between Black women’s relative socioeconomic status to and their homicide victimization by Black men. Further, when Black women hold a greater number of political positions, they are more likely to be killed by white men and police. Thus, Black women’s victimization reflects their vulnerabilities within, and perceived threats to, both gender and racial hierarchies.

Social Change and Race-Specific Homicide Trajectories: An Age-Period-Cohort Analysis.

Social change and the aging process are racially bifurcated in the United States, where Black and White populations have long lived in divergent social worlds. This study examines the cohort patterns and life-course trajectories of Black and White homicide involvement over the past four decades. The study uses data from the Supplemental Homicide Reports and Age-Period-Cohort-Interaction (APC-I) models to analyze race-specific trends of (alleged) homicide offending and victimization between 1976 and 2018 in the U.S. Results reveal similar patterns in the age, period, and cohort effects on Black and White homicide involvement. However, while the shapes of these trajectories are comparable, the volatility in cohort effects on homicide is much more accentuated for Black cohorts than White cohorts. We also find racial differences for cohorts born after 1990, with a downward cohort pattern among the White group but a flat cohort trend among the Black group. Findings suggest that Black cohorts' homicide involvement is more susceptible than White cohorts' to the influence of external social changes (e.g., economic downturn, the crack epidemic). In addition, an increasing racial gap between Black and White populations is found among the recent birth cohorts. Possible mechanisms are discussed.

A Comparative Analysis of Knife and Firearm Homicides in the United States.

In the United States of America firearms are the most common weapons used to commit homicide. This has led the public, academics, media, and policy makers to largely neglect other means of homicide. The second most common weapon used in the commission of a homicide in the USA are knives. On average more than 1,500 people are murdered with a knife each year in the USA. Little attention in the USA is focused on knife violence. However, the same is not true across the globe. After reviewing an international selection of literature, the current study aims to analyze both the victims and offenders of knife homicide in the USA by comparing them to the offenders and victims of firearm homicide. This was accomplished by analyzing data from the Supplementary Homicide Reports from 2014 to 2016. Comparisons between firearm and knife homicides included victim and offender demographics, as well as the relationship between the victim and offender. Bivariate and multivariate analysis are used to show that the victims and offenders of knife homicides are a significantly different group from the victims and offenders of firearm homicide. In the USA victims and offenders of knife violence are more likely to be female, less likely to be minorities, and are significantly older than firearm victims and offenders. The victim and offender in the case of a knife homicide are also significantly more likely to be closely related to one another. Unlike many other countries, in the USA the problem of knife violence appears much more similar to domestic violence than the typical street crime involving firearms. Because of this, knife homicides should not be approached with the same theoretical framework as firearm homicide. Additionally, the policies needed to effectively counter this problem will be different from those intended to deter firearm homicide.

Moving Beyond Individual-Level Explanations: Exploring the Contextual Correlates of Mass Murder

Due to the rarity of mass murder, scholars have focused almost exclusively on its individual-level risk factors, assuming that structural characteristics play a negligible role in the etiology of this infrequent but impactful crime. This study explores whether local structural factors influence the incidence rate of mass murder and its logical comparison group, homicide. Using information from a novel mass killing database as well as the Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR), two-level count regression models examine the county- and state-level factors that predict the number of mass murder ( N = 549) and homicide incidents ( N = 274,399) in 3,143 U.S. counties from 2000 to 2018. Results indicate that mass murder is more likely to occur in disadvantaged and racially/ethnically heterogeneous areas, similar to homicide in general. Future research should examine both perpetrators and their environments instead of assuming that mass murders are exclusively driven by individual-level factors.

Homicide Clearance Rates in the United States, 1976-2017: Examining Homicide Clearance Rates Relative to the Situational Circumstances in Which They Occur.

This study examines homicide clearance rates in the United States using the FBI's supplementary homicide reports data spanning from 1976 to 2017. The goal of this study is to examine the effects of circumstances in which homicides occurred on homicide clearance rates, and the effects of victim's race, age, and gender on homicide clearance rates. The analyses are based on 769,753 total homicide cases that were reported to the FBI. The actual data set includes information for 757,801 victims and 513,863 offenders total. The results of this study show that a typical profile of a homicide victim whose case is more likely to remain unsolved is that of a black male between the ages of 21 to 30 who is killed in a juvenile gang-related killing circumstance. By gender, this study shows that the clearance rate for homicide cases involving female victims is 8.4% higher than for male homicide victims.

Child access prevention laws and juvenile firearm-related homicides

Debate over safe-storage gun regulations has captured public attention in the aftermath of several high-profile shootings committed by minors. To date, the existing literature provides no evidence that these laws are effective at deterring gun crime, a conclusion that has prompted the National Rifle Association to assert that such regulations are “unnecessary” and “ineffective.” Using data from the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports for the period 1985–2013, we find that child access prevention (CAP) laws are associated with a 17 percent reduction in firearm-related homicides committed by juveniles. The estimated effect is stronger among whites than nonwhites and is driven by states enforcing the strictest safe-storage standard. We find no evidence that CAP laws are associated with firearm-related homicides committed by adults or with non-firearm-related homicides committed by juveniles, suggesting that the observed relationship between CAP laws and juvenile firearm-related homicides is causal.

Sex worker homicides and sexual homicides: A comparative study of offender, victim, and offense characteristics.

Sex workers are commonly claimed to be at heightened risk of fatal victimization. Although prior research indicates that the dynamics of sex worker homicides resemble sexual homicides more than nonsexual homicides, little is known about how these types of homicides compare in terms of offending patterns. This study considers a sample of 2,851 single-victim, single-offender homicide cases extracted from a 37-year (1976-2012) US Supplementary Homicide Reports database, and compares the offender, victim, and offender characteristics of 243 sex worker homicides (189 males and 54 females) with those of 2608 sexual homicides (2474 males and 134 females). The findings suggest that the offender, victim, and offense characteristics of general, male-offender, and female-offender sex worker homicides are essentially different from the characteristics of sexual homicides. Logistic regressions further indicate that most offender, victim, and offense characteristics on the occurrence of general and male-offender sex worker homicides were significantly associated with the perpetration of general and male-offender sex worker homicides, with reference to sexual homicides. These findings offer insights relevant to the prioritization of criminal investigative practices.

Profiling homicide cases based on matched victim‐offender demographic characteristics

AbstractThe purpose of this study is to develop an evidence‐based set of inductive profiles based on matched victim‐offender characteristics of homicide cases. To develop these homicide profiles, we used national data from the FBI's supplementary homicide reports that were reported by law enforcement agencies for a period of 42 years, from 1976 to 2017 in the United States. The findings that emerged from the study show that female offenders tend to kill victims of the opposite gender; whereas male offenders kill more victims within their own gender. The probability of becoming a victim of homicide increases for white people and decreases for black people as the offender's age increases. Overall, offenders tend to kill victims about their own age, and as offenders get older, they are more likely to kill female victims than male victims.

Assessing Data Completeness, Quality, and Representativeness of Justifiable Homicides in the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports: A Research Note.

The most widely used data set for studying police homicides-the Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) kept by the Federal Bureau of Investigation-is collected from a voluntary sample. Using a journalist-curated database of police-related deaths, we find the SHR police homicide data to be substantially incomplete. This is due to both non-reporting and substantial under-reporting by agencies. Further, our inquiry discloses a pattern of error in identifying "victims" and "offenders" in the data, and finds that investigating agencies are often incorrectly listed as the responsible agency, which seriously jeopardizes police department-level analyses. Finally, there is evidence of sample bias such that the SHR data system is not representative of all police departments, nor is it representative of large police departments. We conclude that the SHR data is of dubious value for assessing correlates of police homicides in the United States, as all analyses using it will reflect these widespread biases and significant undercounts. Analysis of SHR data for these purposes should cease.

A Typology of Civilians Shot and Killed by US Police: a Latent Class Analysis of Firearm Legal Intervention Homicide in the 2014-2015 National Violent Death Reporting System.

Approximately 1000 people are killed by police acting in the line of duty each year. Historically, research on these deaths, known as legal intervention homicides (LIH), has been limited by data that is either contextually rich but narrow in scope and not readily available to the public (e.g., police department reports from a single city), or detail-poor but geographically broad, large, and readily available (and maintained by federal agencies) (e.g., vital statistics and supplemental homicide reports). Over the past 5years, however, researchers have turned to the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS), which captures nearly all lethal police shootings in participating states while providing detailed incident and victim information. The current study extends prior work on police-involved lethal shootings in three important ways. First, we use latent class analysis to construct a data-driven, exhaustive, mutually exclusive typology of these events, using NVDRS data 2014-2015. Second, rather than fitting some, but not all cases into predefined sub-types, every case is assigned membership to a particular emergent class. Third, we use a validated case identification process in NVDRS to identify incidents of lethal police-involved shootings. Seven classes emerge. Classes differ across important incident and victim characteristics such as the event that brought the victim and law enforcement together, the highest level of force used by the victim against law enforcement, and the kind of weapon, if any, used by the victim during the incident. Demographic variables do not distribute uniformly across classes (e.g., the latent class in which the victim appeared to pose minimal threat to law enforcement was the only class in which the plurality of victims was a non-white race). Our approach to generating these typologies illustrates how data-driven techniques can complement subjective classification schemes and lay the groundwork for analogous analyses using police encounter data that include fatal and non-fatal outcomes.

Female Victims of Police Justifiable Homicide

This paper provides an analysis of characteristics of Police Justifiable Homicide (PJH) events with female victims, including a comparison with a sample of male victims of PJH. Cases were identified using the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Report, and include all-female justifiable homicide victims for a 7-year period (2007–2013), along with a random sample of male victim events in the same period. Additional qualitative information was assembled from newspaper articles related to these cases. In addition to basic demographic characteristics, the following are also examined: the incidence of injury or death of other people (including law enforcement officers) in these events, the type of weapon which was used by the PJH victim, the evidence of mental illness or suicidal behaviors in the victim, and the role of domestic violence in the justifiable homicide event.

Evidence concerning the regulation of firearms design, sale, and carrying on fatal mass shootings in the United States

Research SummaryWe used data from the FBI's Supplemental Homicide Reports and other publicly available databases to calculate state‐level annual incidence of fatal mass shootings for 1984–2017. Negative binomial regression models were used to estimate the associations between changes in key gun laws and fatal mass shootings. Handgun purchaser licensing laws and bans of large‐capacity magazines (LCMs) were associated with significant reductions in the incidence of fatal mass shootings. Other laws commonly advocated as solutions to mass shootings—comprehensive background checks, assault weapons bans, and de‐regulation of civilian concealed carry of firearms—were unrelated to fatal mass shootings.Policy ImplicationsOur findings suggest that laws requiring firearm purchasers to be licensed through a background check process supported by fingerprints and laws banning LCMs are the most effective gun policies for reducing fatal mass shootings.

Righteous Shoot or Racial Injustice? What Crowdsourced Data Can(not) Tell Us About Police-Caused Homicide

Social scientists have developed various theoretical perspectives to explain the disproportionate incidence of police-caused homicide involving Black citizens in the United States. A common approach focuses on structural characteristics (e.g., percent Black) of cities. Such research relies primarily on Uniform Crime Reports’ Supplemental Homicide Reports, which poses two problems for researchers. Undercounting raises concerns about the reliability of findings, and the data are not amenable to testing influential alternative hypotheses. Recently, efforts to more accurately count police-caused homicides have been undertaken, with these new crowdsourced databases increasingly being used in research. When merged with structural-level data, they may allow the estimation of multilevel statistical models that include city-level and event-level predictors of police-caused homicide. These databases also pose methodological challenges, but they hold out the promise of providing a more reliable answer to a fundamental question that has yet to be adequately addressed. Is the racial disparity in police-caused homicide primarily attributable to the objective threats posed by Black citizens or the subjective biases of police officers? This article evaluates the degree to which the new crowdsourced databases can help resolve this conundrum.

Describing a \u201cmass shooting\u201d: the role of databases in understanding burden

BackgroundThe mass shooting phenomenon has gained much attention lately as this form of gun violence appears to increase in frequency. Although many organizations collect information on mass shootings (fatal and nonfatal injuries), no federal definition of this phrase exists. The purpose of this study was to highlight the different statistics that result among databases that define and track “mass shootings.” Establishing definitive guidelines for a mass shooting definition could improve research credibility when presenting evidence to policy makers.MethodsWe obtained data for mass shootings that occurred in 2017 from four sources: Gun Violence Archive, Mother Jones Investigation, Everytown for Gun Safety, and FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Report. We also examined FBI’s Active Shooter Report to compare the mass shootings datasets with active shooter situations, which have been federally defined. First, we examined the overlap among databases. Then, we applied the strictest fatal mass shooting definition to the mass shooting datasets to determine whether the differences in databases could be contributing to differences in fatalities and injuries recorded.ResultsGun Violence Archive recorded the most mass shooting incidents at 346 incidents in 2017, while Mother Jones only recorded 11 cases. Only 2 events were found in all four mass shooting datasets. When the strictest definition – four or more individuals fatally shot – was applied to all datasets, the number of mass shootings in 2017 ranged from 24 (Gun Violence Archive) to 5 (Mother Jones), but incidents collected still varied.ConclusionsThere is much variety in statistics obtained from the different sources that have collected mass shooting information, with little overlap among databases. Researchers should advocate for a standard definition that considers both fatalities and nonfatalities to most appropriately convey the burden of mass shootings on gun violence.

Firearm Use Increases Risk of Multiple Victims in Domestic Homicides.

Domestic homicides account for more than one in four homicides in the United States and frequently involve multiple victims. This study examined the prevalence of firearm use in domestic homicides in the United States and the associated risk of a multiple homicide event. We used weighted negative binomial regression to model the effects of firearm use on the number of additional victims in domestic and nondomestic homicides using data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Supplementary Homicide Reports. Results showed that firearms were used in 54.1 percent of domestic homicides. Firearm use was associated with a 70.9 percent and 38.7 percent increased incidence of additional victimization in domestic and nondomestic homicides, respectively. Whereas male and female perpetrators differed minimally in the likelihood of additional victims in domestic homicides committed with a non-firearm (3.6% versus 2.5%), males were nearly three times more likely to have multiple victims in domestic homicides involving a firearm (6.9% versus 2.4%). Interaction tests showed that the risk of additional victims associated with firearm use was stronger in domestic situations than in nondomestic situations and among male perpetrators. These findings highlight the risk of multiple homicides in domestic homicide situations and the role of firearms in expanding the risk of victimization beyond a single victim.

Surveillance for Violent Deaths - National Violent Death Reporting System, 32 States, 2016.

Surveillance for Violent Deaths - National Violent Death Reporting System, 32 States, 2016.

Firearm Ownership and Domestic Versus Nondomestic Homicide in the U.S.

Gun ownership is associated with firearm mortality, although this association differs across victim-offender relationships. This study examines the relationship between gun ownership and domestic versus nondomestic homicide rates by victim sex. Several sources of state-level panel data from 1990 through 2016 were merged from each of the 50 states to model domestic (i.e., family and intimate partners) and nondomestic firearm homicide as a function of state-level household firearm ownership. Firearm ownership was examined using a validated proxy measure and homicide rates came from the Supplemental Homicide Reports of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports. Negative binomial regression with fixed effects was used to model the outcomes and employed generalized estimating equations to account for clustering within states. Statistical analyses were completed in 2018. State-level firearm ownership was uniquely associated with domestic (incidence rate ratio=1.013, 95% CI=1.008, 1.018) but not nondomestic (incidence rate ratio=1.002, 95% CI=0.996, 1.008) firearm homicide rates, and this pattern held for both male and female victims. States in the top quartile of firearm ownership had a 64.6% (p<0.001) higher incidence rate of domestic firearm homicide than states in the lowest quartile; however, states in the top quartile did not differ significantly from states in the lowest quartile of firearm ownership in observed incidence rates of nondomestic firearm homicide. State-level firearm ownership rates are related to rates of domestic but not nondomestic firearm homicide.

Trends in the Lethality of American Violence

Research on homicide trends has not adequately considered trends in interpersonal disputes. Aggregate homicide rates partly reflect the extent to which less serious forms of interpersonal violence escalate to deadly violence. This study argues that the rate of disputes in a society and the proportion that result in deadly violence vary independently. But both are necessary to understand lethality trends. The study compares rates of homicide in the Supplemental Homicide Report with rates of violence in the National Crime Victimization Survey to estimate lethality trends from 1992 to 2016. Findings are discussed regarding their implications for explanations of homicide trends.

National and Local Trends in Serious Violence, Firearm Victimization, and Homicide

The recent upturn in U.S. homicide rates may have resulted from increases in the number of serious violent incidents, growth in the percentage involving firearms, or increases in lethality. Data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) suggest that the national homicide increase was not driven by increases in serious violence or the proportion of these crimes involving firearms, but may be related to a longer-term increase in lethality. In St. Louis, the increase was concentrated in communities that previously had the highest violence rates, but changes in the structural conditions and population composition were unrelated to the upsurge in homicide.