Understanding Escalation Through Intimate Partner Homicide Narratives.

The study aims to expand our understanding of escalation from intimate partner violence to intimate partner homicide (IPH) by exploring the known circumstances leading up to a lethal event. The study draws on qualitative data from law enforcement reports and coroner/medical examiner reports within the National Violent Death Reporting System to identify themes preceding and surrounding IPH incidents. Findings support the utility of risk assessments in identifying escalation while illustrating the complex ways that violence between current or former intimate partners can escalate to lethality, particularly the role of separation and the use of firearms.

County Variation in Intimate Partner Homicide: A Comparison of Hispanic and Non-Hispanic Victims.

Over the past 5 years, intimate partner homicides have increased among Hispanic women, although ethnicity has rarely been brought into macro-level research on intimate partner homicide. These trends have occurred alongside many macro-level changes in the United States. Although both Hispanic and non-Hispanic women are most likely to die at the hands of a partner via a firearm, no study to date has examined the importance of licensed firearm dealer availability in addition to leading macro-level correlates of intimate partner homicide. Using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Violent Death Reporting System, the current study explores the role of licensed firearm dealer availability, economic disadvantage, and other features of counties to explore ethnic-specific variation in intimate partner homicides from 2010 to 2016. Results from multilevel negative binomial models revealed consistency in the estimated effects of the rate of licensed firearm dealers and divorce on partner homicides across all models, although the significant association of gun stores and intimate partner homicide was witnessed in urban counties for total and non-Hispanic (both Black and White) models only. Important variation also exists across racial and ethnic groups, including well-established correlates of overall intimate partner homicide (i.e., economic disadvantage, rurality, non-intimate homicide rate, and state policies).

American crime drops: Investigating the breaks, dips and drops in temporal homicide.

OBJECTIVES: While a great deal of attention has been given to the 1990s crime drop, less is known about the more recent decline in homicide rates that occurred in several large U.S. cities. This paper aims to explore whether these represent two distinct drops via statistical evidence of structural breaks in longitudinal homicide trends and explore potentially differing explanations for the two declines. METHODS: Using homicide data on a large sample of U.S. cities from 1990 to 2011, we test for structural breaks in temporal homicide rates. Combining census data and a time series approach, we also examine the role structural features, demographic shifts, and crime control strategies played in the changes in homicide rates over time. RESULTS: Statistical evidence demonstrates two structural breaks in homicide trends, with one trend reflecting the 1990s crime drop (1994-2002) and another trend capturing a second decline (2007-2011). Time series analysis confirms previous research findings about the contributions of structural conditions (e.g., disadvantage) and crime control strategies (e.g., police force size) to the crime drop of the 1990s, but these factors cannot account for the more recent drop with the exception of police presence. CONCLUSIONS: Although both structural conditions and crime control strategies are critical to the longitudinal trends in homicide rates over the entire span from 1990 to 2011, different factors account for these two distinct temporal trends.

The Changing Urban Landscape: Interconnections Between Racial/Ethnic Segregation and Exposure in the Study of Race-Specific Violence Over Time.

OBJECTIVES: We investigated how racial/ethnic shifts in the urban landscape influence race-specific violence by considering changes in the size of the Hispanic population, racial/ethnic contact, and racial segregation patterns. METHODS: We used a time-series approach incorporating 4 decennial periods (1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010) to determine whether racial/ethnic demographic changes in 144 US cities influenced White and Black homicide rates. Sources included census and Uniform Crime Reports Supplemental Homicide Report data. RESULTS: The growing diversity in the residential population of US cities contributed to the dramatic decline in homicide rates over time, but the effects differed by racial group. Exposure between Hispanics and Blacks and the growing presence of Hispanics led to a reduced Black homicide trend but had no impact on Whites, after adjustment for economic shifts and other important structural features in US cities. CONCLUSIONS: Our research highlights the importance of paying closer attention to exposure and integration between immigrants and existing racial groups. Failure to consider racial/ethnic contact and the racial nature of urban violence may produce misleading results in studies of associations between Hispanic immigration and crime.

Teasing out the effects of macro-conditions on race-specific male homicide rates: Do distinct predictors vary by racial group and over time?

Researchers tend to capture the multiple disadvantages facing urban areas by using an all-encompassing disadvantage index, which combines poverty, joblessness and other economic predictors into a single index. While the use of this index is important for conceptual and methodological reasons, questions remain about whether these city characteristics differ in magnitude and significance when influencing race-specific homicide rates and whether or not there effects exhibit stability or vary over time? This article examines how discrete measures of disadvantage differ in their importance for race-specific groups over three critical time points: 1980, 1990, and 2000. After accounting for problems associated with statistical inferences, cross sectional, Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) analyses reveal that family disruption and poverty status were among the strongest predictors of race-specific homicide rates. Wald tests for the equality of coefficients confirmed significant differences in the influence of many discrete measures of disadvantage for white and black males, but the number of differences declined from 1980 and into the 2000s. That is, along with the crime drop, our research reveals increasing racial parity in structural predictors over time.

The dynamic relationship between homicide rates and social, economic, and political factors from 1970 to 2000*.

After reaching their highest levels of the 20th century, homicide rates in the United States declined precipitously in the early 1990s. This study examines a number of factors that might have contributed to both the sharp increase and decline in homicide rates. We use a pooled cross-sectional time series model to assess the relationship between changes in structural conditions and the change in homicide rates over four decennial time points (1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000). We assess the extent to which structural covariates associated with social, economic and political conditions commonly used in homicide research (e.g., urban decay, poverty, and the weakening of family and social bonds) are related to the change in homicide rates. Along with these classic covariates, we incorporate some contemporary explanations (e.g., imprisonment rates and drug trafficking) that have been proposed to address the recent decline in urban homicide rates. Our results indicate that both classic and contemporary explanations are related to homicide trends over the last three decades of the 20th century. Specifically, changes in resource deprivation and in the relative size of the youth population are associated with changes in the homicide rate across these time points. Increased imprisonment is also significantly related to homicide changes. These findings lead us to conclude that efforts to understand the changing nature of homicide will require serious consideration, if not integration, of classic and contemporary explanations.

The political economy of urban homicide: assessing the relative impact of gender inequality on sex-specific victimization.

This research examines the ways in which the changing political economy of urban areas has contributed differently to the homicide victimization rates of females and males across US cities. Recent research, while relatively limited, has presented disparate results regarding the effect of gender inequality on urban sex-specific victimization. Our work further explores this relationship by taking into account relative gender disparities in income, education, labor market opportunities, and politics in an examination of sex-specific homicide victimization in 1990. Key to this current investigation is the evaluation of feminist and lifestyle arguments that suggest that structural gender inequality has a unique effect on female victimization. Overall, our findings reveal gender inequality to be a significant predictor of both male and female urban homicide. While these findings suggest mixed support for theoretical arguments regarding gender inequality, further analyses reveal significant differences in specific types of gender inequality on victimization patterns across genders. These additional results highlight the need for greater attention toward both methodological and theoretical issues when examining the interconnections between gender, political economy, and violence in research.