Challenges to the veracity and the international comparability of Russian homicide statistics

Abstract

Homicide statistics are often seen as the most reliable and comparable indicator of violent deaths around the world. However, the analysis of Russian homicide statistics challenges this understanding and suggests that international comparisons of homicide levels can be hazardous. Drawing on an institutionalist perspective on crime statistics, official crime-based homicide statistics in Russia are approached as a social construct, a performance indicator and a tool of governance. The paper discusses several incentives to misrepresent official homicide data in contemporary Russia, including politicization of homicide statistics as a legacy of the Soviet’ era’s falsified crime statistics and the role of policing. Mainly, the paper identifies and describes the exact legal, statistical and country-specific substantive mechanisms that allow homicide statistics to be distorted in Russia. By considering legal mechanisms alone, the more accurate homicide rate may be at least 1.6 times higher than that reported in the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Global Study on Homicide 2013.

A gender geography of intentional homicide within and outside of the family: Male and female murders in Europe, the US and Canada (2003–15)

“…2. A recent article on Russia suggests that the homicide rate for the country may be at least 1.6 times higher than that reported in the UNODC Global Study on Homicide 2013 (Lysova, 2018).…”

Features of prosecutorial inspections of criminal fires (by the example of Kuzbass) as markers of sustainable development of mining region

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Toward a Criminology of Terrorism

“…Indeed, Interpol stopped making its crime data publicly available in 2006 (Smit et al, 2012) and few studies before 2000 relied on UNODC data. Hence, at the turn of the twenty-first century, most researchers (Aebi, 2010;Lappi-Seppälä & Tonry, 2011;Lysova, 2020) considered WHO data to be the "gold standard" for cross-national homicide estimates. However, in recent years, the comprehensiveness of UNODC data has greatly increased (www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/global-study-on-homicide.html), and as a result, a growing number of studies have begun to rely on UNODC homicide data (Rennó Santos, Testa & Weiss 2018;Kamprad & Liem, 2021).…”