Age Standardized American Homicide Rates

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

As scholars struggle to understand homicide rates from their dangerous highs in 1990 to their puzzling inconsistency in the late 1990s, long range perspectives become more essential. What precedents have there been? When? Where? What can we learn from them? Or, is the last decade shift a unique event? This project establishes age standardized homicide rates for six large American cities from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century. It uses capture-recapture sampling when needed to correct unreliable public health reports or other individual level sources known to undercount, such as indictment records. When fully complete, the data set will allow the testing of several hypotheses related to violence. Did cities converge and begin to covary? When is it legitimate to discuss a national rate? Is sex distribution's impact on homicides a purely time dependent variable? When does the negative relationship between big city size and homicide rates that prevailed in 1900 change to a positive one? Does internal migration from high (or low), affect rates?