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Estimating the Accuracy of Historic Homicide Rates

New York City and Los Angeles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Eric H. Monkkonen
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Extract

Even though it declined in the last decade of the twentieth century, homicide remains anAmerican problem of extraordinary importance. Yet our empirical knowledge is remarkably shortsighted. Simply put, most researchers focus on the past decade or two—usually for reasons having to do with convenience, not theory—and ignore the longer term. However, recent work has shown that past lethality is inherently recoverable, and that there is every reason to expect that comparable homicide rates across time and place should be used to set current research in context (Gurr 1981; Johnson and Monkkonen 1996; Ylkiangas forthcoming; Eisner 2000).This paper builds on some of my recent research and responds to the challenge of a recent paper by Douglas Eckberg (1998), who has shown that not only can we recover the past, but that we can even estimate missing data counts.

Type
Special Issue: Bloody Murder
Information
Social Science History , Volume 25 , Issue 1: Special Issue: Bloody Murder , spring 2001 , pp. 53 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 2001 

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