Pinker makes the sweeping argument that violence declines with modernization as countries of the world gradually converge in terms of economic markets, communication structures, and culture. An alternative prediction is provided by conflict perspectives, which argue that growing income inequality both within and between countries will serve to drive criminal violence ever higher. We use fixed effects regression models to examine the extent to which national homicide victimization rates for 55 countries have shared declining trends for the past six decades. Our results show that homicide rates in the countries examined trended in the same downward direction since the early 1990s, but support for a modernization perspective was limited mostly to a subset of wealthy, western-style democracies.

Although most crimes follow seasonal cycles, homicide is an apparent exception. The absence of homicide seasonality is surprising given that assault, a closely related offense, has an obvious annual pattern. Focusing on large U.S. cities, this article reevaluates seasonality in homicide rates using data with more extensive spatial and areal dimensions than in previous research. Panel decompositions reveal seasonal cycles in both homicide and assault rates. Seasonality stands out more clearly in assault, however, and the patterns differ somewhat in their details. The findings support the idea that assault and homicide have similar seasonal fluctuations, but they also suggest that the crimes are more distinct than criminologists often believe.

We investigated the precision of Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR) homicide rate estimates for large U.S. cities during the 5 years, 1998-2002. The homicide rates based on the National Vital Statistics System provided a parallel measure and the basis for estimating the reliability and average error. When cities with incomplete SHR data were removed from the sample, the estimated reliability was high (.99), and the standard error of measurement was low (1.2 homicides per 100,000 residents). Reliability remained high for subsets of cities and for most subsets of victims. For some groups, however, such as African Americans and persons age 0 to 14, the reliability was much lower.