Can Homicide Serve as an Indicator of Non-lethal Crime? A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Homicide rates are often used as an indicator of levels of crime. The reasons for this are both practical and conceptual. Practically speaking, homicide statistics tend to be more reliable than statistics for other forms of crime. Conceptually speaking, homicide and other forms of crime are often considered to be related: homicide is seen as the “tip of the iceberg” of underlying crime. However, it remains unclear whether this convention is empirically justifiable. Here, we review empirical evidence for the idea that homicide can serve as an indicator of crime more generally. We identify 31 previous studies that include information on this issue. Findings indicate that homicide is related to other forms of crime (particularly violent crimes) in larger scale, and cross-sectional analyses, but studies focusing on smaller levels of analysis identify substantial variation depending on location or time frame being considered. We conclude that homicide can function as an indicator of violent crime in general, but no clear pattern emerges as to what that means concretely. To those authors wishing to use homicide as an indicator of (violent) crime, we recommend that they conduct and report preliminary work to establish to what extent this notion is justified within the context and time frame on which they wish to focus.

Examining the stability and change in age-crime relation in South Korea, 1980–2019: An age-period-cohort analysis

“…When there are strong cohort effects present, however, the shape of an age curve may shift significantly. For instance, cohort effects have contributed to an older peak (ages 45-49) observed from the homicide APC curve in 2010-14 as compared to the average age-homicide curve (ages [35][36][37][38][39]. The birth cohort reaching their late 40s in 2010-14 has higher-thanexpected homicide rates, while the young adults and middle-aged cohorts in 2010-14 have lower-than-expected theft rates, which together have modified the age-homicide curve from a symmetrical distribution to a left-skewed distribution.…”

“…If the adolescent spike in arrests for theft is seen as real, it is unlikely that stringent enforcement is selectively applied only to youth involved in theft while simultaneously maintaining lenient policing toward other forms of adolescent law violation [8]. Furthermore, the older average age-crime schedule observed for homicide, a crime widely regarded as the most reliably reported crime with a lower likelihood of being affected by policing variations across ages [38], adds further confidence that the dissimilar age-arrest patterns in SK are not solely a result of differential policing. Lastly, qualitative data gathered via interviews with SK police officers and criminologists in prior studies indicate that the spread-out age-crime distributions in SK indeed reflect significant differences in the cultural and social contexts of SK that influence individuals' criminal behaviors [8].…”