There has been little research on United States homicide rates from a long-term perspective, primarily because there has been no consistent data series on a particular place preceding the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), which began its first full year in 1931. To fill this research gap, this project created a data series on homicides per capita for New York City that spans two centuries. The goal was to create a site-specific, individual-based data series that could be used to examine major social shifts related to homicide, such as mass immigration, urban growth, war, demographic changes, and changes in laws. Data were also gathered on various other sites, particularly in England, to allow for comparisons on important issues, such as the post-World War II wave of violence. The basic approach to the data collection was to obtain the best possible estimate of annual counts and the most complete information on individual homicides. The annual count data (Parts 1 and 3) were derived from multiple sources, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports and Supplementary Homicide Reports, as well as other official counts from the New York City Police Department and the City Inspector in the early 19th century. The data include a combined count of murder and manslaughter because charge bargaining often blurs this legal distinction. The individual-level data (Part 2) were drawn from coroners' indictments held by the New York City Municipal Archives, and from daily newspapers. Duplication was avoided by keeping a record for each victim. The estimation technique known as "capture-recapture" was used to estimate homicides not listed in either source. Part 1 variables include counts of New York City homicides, arrests, and convictions, as well as the homicide rate, race or ethnicity and gender of victims, type of weapon used, and source of data. Part 2 includes the date of the murder, the age, sex, and race of the offender and victim, and whether the case led to an arrest, trial, conviction, execution, or pardon. Part 3 contains annual homicide counts and rates for various comparison sites including Liverpool, London, Kent, Canada, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Seattle, and San Francisco.

This data collection resulted from the project "Linked Homicide File for 1990-1999," which was conducted by the California Department of Health Services (CDHS), Epidemiology and Prevention for Injury Control Branch, for the purpose of studying homicide and providing evidence for the development of strategies to reduce homicide in California. The researchers combined the strengths of law enforcement reporting and medical reporting in one dataset. The homicide data contain information on victims and circumstances of the 34,542 homicides investigated by law enforcement agencies in California for the period 1990 to 1999. The data are Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR), which are received monthly by the Department of Justice from all local California law enforcement agencies as part of the national Uniform Crime Reporting program (UNIFORM CRIME REPORTS [UNITED STATES]: SUPPLEMENTARY HOMICIDE REPORTS, 1976-1999 [ICPSR 3180]). The researchers linked the SHRs to the CDHS vital statistics mortality data, which contain the death records provided by the medical examiner or coroner of each county after investigation of the death. Variables include total number of offenders involved, weapon used in the homicide, county of the victim's residence, location and date of the incident, date of death, cause of death, date of arrest for the suspect, and whether supplemental homicide report matched the death record. Demographic data include age, sex, and race of the victim and the suspect, relationships between the suspect and the victim, and the victim's marital status.

This study was undertaken to standardize the format of national homicide data and to analyze trends over the period 1968-1978. The unit of analysis is the homicide victim, and variables include information on the reporting agency, the circumstances of the incident, and the characteristics of the victim and the offender. Within these categories are variables pertaining to population and city size, victim's and offender's age, race, and sex, and the number of victims and offenders involved in the incident. Information about the incident includes the type of weapon used and the circumstances surrounding the incident.

This data collection examines gang and non-gang homicides as well as other types of offenses in small California jurisdictions. Data are provided on violent gang offenses and offenders as well as on a companion sample of non-gang offenses and offenders. Two separate data files are supplied, one for participants and one for incidents. The participant data include age, gender, race, and role of participants. The incident data include information from the "violent incident data collection form" (setting, auto involvement, and amount of property loss), and the "group indicators coding form" (argot, tattoos, clothing, and slang terminology).

The purpose of the project was to learn more about patterns of homicide in the United States by strengthening the ability to make imputations for Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) data with missing values. Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) and local police data from Chicago, Illinois, St. Louis, Missouri, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Phoenix, Arizona, for 1990 to 1995 were merged to create a master file by linking on overlapping information on victim and incident characteristics. Through this process, 96 percent of the cases in the SHR were matched with cases in the police files. The data contain variables for three types of cases: complete in SHR, missing offender and incident information in SHR but known in police report, and missing offender and incident information in both. The merged file allows estimation of similarities and differences between the cases with known offender characteristics in the SHR and those in the other two categories. The accuracy of existing data imputation methods can be assessed by comparing imputed values in an "incomplete" dataset (the SHR), generated by the three imputation strategies discussed in the literature, with the actual values in a known "complete" dataset (combined SHR and police data). Variables from both the Supplemental Homicide Reports and the additional police report offense data include incident date, victim characteristics, offender characteristics, incident details, geographic information, as well as variables regarding the matching procedure.

As a contribution to nationwide efforts to more thoroughly understand urban violence, this study was conducted to assess the impact of cultural dynamics on homicide rates in Houston, Texas, and to profile homicides in the city from 1985 to 1994. This data collection provides the results of quantitative analysis of data collected from all Houston homicide cases recorded in the police murder logs for 1985-1994. Variables describe the homicide circumstances, the victim-offender relationship, the type of weapon used, and any drug- or gang-related activity involved. Other variables include the year and month in which the homicide occurred, whether the homicide occurred on a weekday or over the weekend, the motive of the homicide, whether the homicide was drug-related, whether the case was cleared by police at time of data entry, weapon type and means of killing, the relationship between the victim and the offender, whether a firearm was the homicide method, whether it was a multiple victim incident or multiple offender incident, whether the victim or the offender was younger than age 15, and the inter-racial relationship between the victim and the offender. Demographic variables include age, sex, and race of the victim as well as the offender.

This table contains data on the rate of violent crime (crimes per 1,000 population) for California, its regions, counties, cities and towns. Crime and population data are from the Federal Bureau of Investigations, Uniform Crime Reports. Rates above the city/town level include data from city, university and college, county, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies. The table is part of a series of indicators in the Healthy Communities Data and Indicators Project of the Office of Health Equity. Ten percent of all deaths in young California adults aged 15-44 years are related to assault and homicide. In 2010, California law enforcement agencies reported 1,809 murders, 8,331 rapes, and over 95,000 aggravated assaults. African Americans in California are 11 times more likely to die of assault and homicide than Whites. More information about the data table and a data dictionary can be found in the About/Attachments section.

This table contains data on the rate of violent crime (crimes per 1,000 population) for California, its regions, counties, cities and towns. Crime and population data are from the Federal Bureau of Investigations, Uniform Crime Reports. Rates above the city/town level include data from city, university and college, county, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies. The table is part of a series of indicators in the Healthy Communities Data and Indicators Project of the Office of Health Equity. Ten percent of all deaths in young California adults aged 15-44 years are related to assault and homicide. In 2010, California law enforcement agencies reported 1,809 murders, 8,331 rapes, and over 95,000 aggravated assaults. African Americans in California are 11 times more likely to die of assault and homicide than Whites. More information about the data table and a data dictionary can be found in the About/Attachments section.

This project's main goal was to develop an analytical framework that could be used for analysis of rare crimes observed at local (intra-city) levels of geographic aggregation. To demonstrate the application of this framework to a real-world issue, this project analyzed the occurrence of different types of homicide at both the census tract and neighborhood cluster level in Chicago. Homicide counts for Chicago's 865 census tracts for 1989-1991 were obtained from HOMICIDES IN CHICAGO, 1965-1995 (ICPSR 6399), Part 1: Victim Level Data. The types of homicide examined were gang-related, instrumental, family-related expressive, known person expressive, stranger expressive, and other. Demographic and socioeconomic data at the census tract level for the year 1990 were obtained from the Neighborhood Change Database (NCDB) at the Urban Institute. Part 1 contains these data, as initially obtained, at the census tract level. Part 2 contains an aggregated version of the same data for Chicago's 343 neighborhood clusters as defined by the Project on Human Development in Chicago's Neighborhoods.

These datasets contain information on every homicide in the murder analysis files of the Chicago Police Department for the years 1965-1995. For the victim-level file, Part 1, data are provided on the relationship of victim to offender, whether the victim or offender had previously committed a violent or nonviolent offense, time of occurrence and place of homicide, type of weapon used, cause and motivation for the incident, whether the incident involved drugs, alcohol, gangs, child abuse, or a domestic relationship, if or how the offender was identified, and information on the death of the offender(s). Demographic variables such as the age, sex, and race of each victim and offender are also provided. The victim-level file contains one record for each victim. Information for up to five offenders is included on each victim record. The same offender information is duplicated depending on the number of victims. For example, if a sole offender is responsible for five victims, the file contains five victim records with the offender's information repeated on each record. Part 2, Offender-Level Data, is provided to allow the creation of offender rates and risk analysis that could not be accurately prepared using the victim-level file due to the repeating of the offender information on each victim record. Offender variables were reorganized during the creation of the offender file so that each known offender is associated with a single record. A majority of the variables in the offender-level file are replicas of variables in the victim-level file. The offender records contain demographic information about the offender, demographic and relationship information about the offender's first victim (or sole victim if there was only one), and information about the homicide incident. Information pertaining to the homicide incident such as location, weapon, or drug use are the same as in the victim-level file. In cases where the offender data were completely missing in the victim-level data, no offender records were generated in the offender-level file. The offender-level data do not contain information about the victims in these cases. Geographic variables in both files include the census tract, community area, police district, and police area.