By Rumbi Matamba and Chwayita Thobela

Over the past decade, the GI-TOC has documented a staggering 108% increase in targeted killings in South Africa. While South Africa has long grappled with high levels of violence, as evidenced by a per capita murder rate of 45 per 100,000 in 2022/23, or approximately 70 murders a day, targeted killings have notably escalated, particularly political killings at local municipal level. Hitmen have become more daring, incidents more public and victims more high-profile. Coupled with the deficiencies in South Africa’s overburdened criminal justice system, where only about 15% of all murders are solved, the picture that emerges is one of a situation that is barely contained.

GI-TOC recorded 131 targeted killings in South Africa in 2023, just ten fewer than in 2022. The 131 cases were grouped into four categories: organized-crime related (46 cases or 35% of incidents), minibus taxi-industry related (45 incidents, or 34%), political assassinations (31 incidents, or nearly 24%) and personal assassinations (9 incidents, or nearly 7%). While every effort is made to ensure that the data is robust and accurate, this is almost certainly an undercount as the database draws on publicly available information such as press reports, media statements from affected families, court records, and media statements by the criminal justice sector.

This report is framed in the context of South Africa’s 2024 general elections. Previous analysis has shown that there are always spikes in political assassinations during election years, particularly in long-contested provinces such as KwaZulu-Natal. The 2024 elections, the sixth national election in the country’s 30 years of democracy, have been earmarked as a potential watershed moment.

Political violence and assassinations pose a very real threat to the country’s democracy. They are not an isolated phenomenon and they intersect with organized crime and criminal networks. The intertwining of criminal networks and political assassinations in South Africa underscores the urgent need for comprehensive strategies to tackle organized crime and stop targeted killings.

Geneva, SWIT: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2024. 32p.

By David Pyrooz

Between 1990 and 2021, for adult offenders, Colorado punished felony murder with a mandatory minimum sentence of life without parole. Felony murder was classified as a class 1 felony, along with other theories of first-degree murder, such as after-deliberation and extreme indifference murder, as well as first-degree kidnapping, until Governor Jared Polis signed Senate Bill 124, effective September 15, 2021, reclassifying the offense to a class 2 felony. As a result, felony murder is now punishable by a sentence of 16-48 years.

The purpose of this study is to provide a statistical portrait of people who have been convicted of felony murder between 1990 and 2021. Data were acquired through open records requests from the Colorado Department of Corrections (“CDOC”) and the State Court Administrator’s Office (“SCAO”), along with public data from the Colorado State Demography Office. This study’s primary unit of analysis is a criminal case, meaning a criminal case identifiable by a single case number in which a person was found guilty. With respect to felony murder, a felony murder case means one with one or more felony murder convictions where no other theory of first-degree murder was proven with respect to that or those homicide(s).

Unpublished paper, 2023.

By Nanzi Zheng, Karen M. Abram,  Leah J. Welty; et alDavid A

Importance  Youths, especially Black and Hispanic males, are disproportionately affected by firearm violence. Yet, no epidemiologic studies have examined the incidence rates of nonfatal firearm injury and firearm mortality in those who may be at greatest risk—youths who have been involved with the juvenile justice system.

Objectives  To examine nonfatal firearm injury and firearm mortality in youths involved with the juvenile justice system and to compare incidence rates of firearm mortality with the general population.

Design, Setting, and Participants  The Northwestern Juvenile Project is a 25-year prospective longitudinal cohort study of 1829 youths after juvenile detention in Chicago, Illinois. Youths were randomly sampled by strata (sex, race and ethnicity, age, and legal status [juvenile or adult court]) at intake from the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center. Participants were interviewed at baseline (November 1995 to June 1998) and reinterviewed as many as 13 times over 16 years, through February 2015. Official records on mortality were collected through December 2020. Data analysis was conducted from November 2018 to August 2022.

Main Outcomes and Measures  Participants self-reported nonfatal firearm injuries. Firearm deaths were identified from county and state records and collateral reports. Data on firearm deaths in the general population were obtained from the Illinois Department of Public Health. Population counts were obtained from the US census.

Results  The baseline sample of 1829 participants included 1172 (64.1%) males and 657 (35.9%) females; 1005 (54.9%) Black, 524 (28.6%) Hispanic, 296 (16.2%) non-Hispanic White, and 4 (0.2%) from other racial and ethnic groups (mean [SD] age, 14.9 [1.4] years). Sixteen years after detention, more than one-quarter of Black (156 of 575 [27.1%]) and Hispanic (103 of 387 [26.6%]) males had been injured or killed by firearms. Males had 13.6 (95% CI, 8.6-21.6) times the rate of firearm injury or mortality than females. Twenty-five years after the study began, 88 participants (4.8%) had been killed by a firearm. Compared with the Cook County general population, most demographic groups in the sample had significantly higher rates of firearm mortality (eg, rate ratio for males, 2.8; 95% CI, 2.0-3.9; for females: 6.5; 95% CI, 3.0-14.1; for Black males, 2.5; 95% CI, 1.7-3.7; for Hispanic males, 9.6; 95% CI, 6.2-15.0; for non-Hispanic White males, 23.0; 95% CI, 11.7-45.5).

Conclusions and Relevance  This is the first study to examine the incidence of nonfatal firearm injury and firearm mortality in youths who have been involved with the juvenile justice system. Reducing firearm injury and mortality in high-risk youths and young adults requires a multidisciplinary approach involving legal professionals, health care professionals, educators, street outreach workers, and public health researchers.

JAMA Netw Open. 2023;6(4):e238902. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.8902

By The Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism

Every year, individuals with ties to different extreme causes and movements kill people in the United States; the ADL Center on Extremism (COE) tracks these murders. Extremists regularly commit murders in the service of their ideology, to further a group or gang they may belong to, or even while engaging in traditional, non-ideological criminal activities.

In 2023, domestic extremists killed at least 17 people in the U.S., in seven separate incidents. This represents a sharp decrease from the 27 extremist-related murders ADL has documented for 2022—which itself was a decrease from the 35 identified in 2021. It continues a trend of fewer extremist-related killings after a five-year span of 47-79 extremist-related murders per year (2015-2019). One reason for the trend is the decrease in recent years of extremist-related killings by domestic Islamist extremists and left-wing extremists.

The 2023 murder totals include two extremist-related shootings sprees, both by white supremacists, which together accounted for 11 of the 17 deaths. A third shooting spree, also by an apparent white supremacist, wounded several people but luckily did not result in fatalities.

All the extremist-related murders in 2023 were committed by right-wing extremists of various kinds, with 15 of the 17 killings involving perpetrators or accomplices with white supremacist connections. This is the second year in a row that right-wing extremists have been connected to all identified extremist-related killings.

Two of the incidents from 2023 involved women playing some role in the killing or its aftermath. This report includes a special section that examines the role played by women in deadly extremist violence in the United States by analyzing 50 incidents from the past 20 years in which women were involved in some fashion in extremist-related killings

New York: ADL, 2024. 36p.

By Kylie Murdock and Jim Kessler

Takeaways: The murder rate in the 25 states that voted for Donald Trump has exceeded the murder rate in the 25 states that voted for Joe Biden in every year from 2000 to 2020. Over this 21-year span, this Red State murder gap has steadily widened from a low of 9% more per capita red state murders in 2003 and 2004 to 44% more per capita red state murders in 2019, before settling back to 43% in 2020. Altogether, the per capita Red State murder rate was 23% higher than the Blue State murder rate when all 21 years were combined. If Blue State murder rates were as high as Red State murder rates, Biden-voting states would have sued over 45,000 more murders between 2000 and 2020. Even when murders in the largest cities in red states are removed, overall murder rates in Trump-voting states were 12% higher than Biden-voting states across this 21-year period and were higher in 18 of the 21 years observed.

Washington, DC: Third Way, 2023. 10p

By Hannah R. Johnson

The ritual murder accusation is one of a series of myths that fall under the label blood libel, and describes the medieval legend that Jews require Christian blood for obscure religious purposes and are capable of committing murder to obtain it. This malicious myth continues to have an explosive afterlife in the public sphere, where Sarah Palin's 2011 gaffe is only the latest reminder of its power to excite controversy. Blood Libel is the first book-length study to analyze the recent historiography of the ritual murder accusation and to consider these debates in the context of intellectual and cultural history as well as methodology. Hannah R. Johnson articulates how ethics shapes methodological decisions in the study of the accusation and how questions about methodology, in turn, pose ethical problems of interpretation and understanding.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. 250p

By Pitcavage, Mark

From the document: "[1] Every year, individuals with ties to different extreme causes and movements kill people in the United States; the ADL [Anti-Defamation League] Center on Extremism (COE) tracks these murders. Extremists regularly commit murders in the service of their ideology, in the service of a group or gang they may belong to, or even while engaging in traditional, non-ideological criminal activities. [2] In 2022, domestic extremists killed at least 25 people in the U.S., in 12 separate incidents. […] [3] The 2022 murder totals would have been much lower if not for two high-casualty extremist-related shooting sprees. Only 10 of the 25 deaths occurred outside of those sprees--and one of those 10 deaths occurred in a less lethal mass shooting attempt. [4] The issue of extremist-related mass killings is of growing concern and is the subject of a special section of this report. […] The Center on Extremism has identified 62 extremist-connected mass killing incidents since 1970, with 46 of them being ideologically motivated. […] [5] In 2022, 18 of the 25 extremist-related murders appear to have been committed in whole or part for ideological motives, while the remaining seven murders either have no clear motive or were committed for a non-ideological motive. [6] All the extremist-related murders in 2022 were committed by right-wing extremists of various kinds, who typically commit most such killings each year but only occasionally are responsible for all (the last time this occurred was 2012). […] [7] White supremacists commit the greatest number of domestic extremist-related murders in most years, but in 2022 the percentage was unusually high: 21 of the 25 murders were linked to white supremacists." This document includes charts, tables, and graphs to illustrate the text.

Anti-Defamation League. 2022

By Ames C. Grawert, Adureh Onyekwere, and Cameron Kimble

This report analyzes available crime data from police departments in the 30 largest U.S. cities. It finds that across the cities where data is available, the overall murder and crime rates are projected to decline in 2018, continuing similar decreases from the previous year.

New York: Brennan Center for Justice, 2019. 10p. 

By European Institute for Gender Equality

This literature review contributes to a comparative analysis of definitions of, types of, indicators of and data collection systems on femicide in the EU Member States and the United Kingdom, and at international level. It is based on a comprehensive and in-depth search for studies published in respected peer-reviewed journals and in books. The aim is to give an overview of the existing multidisciplinary literature on variables and factors used to identify femicide and gender-related motives of female homicides. It provides a structured outline of the state of play on defining and creating typologies of femicide. The literature review relies on a broad definition of femicide as ‘structural violence’, while acknowledging that femicide is an individual act with a specific motivation. It also reviews methodologies of gathering data on femicide, together with current challenges, and identifies adequate variables to identify femicide and gender-related motives of homicide. Only some of the literature described can contribute to developing an indicator of femicide or statistical measurement.

Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2021. 59p.

By Anna-Maria Getoš Kalac.

First Findings from the Balkan Homicide Study.The first volume using original empirical data from the Balkan Homicide study. Performs analysis from 3000 case files from 6 Balkans countries. Addresses prosecution case files as well as judicial case files, enabling methodological and phenomenological investigation into the nature of (lethal) violence in the Balkans.

Cham: Springer, 2021. 124p.

By Roger Lane.

This book is a history of criminal homicide, or murder, in America. Murder is one of the two most common forms of intentional homicide, defined simply as the killing of one human being by another; the other is war. The third, capital punishment, is linked to both; death may be decreed either for failing to kill when a society demands it or for killing when a society forbids it. All three forms are linked in other, sometimes surprising ways. But while war has been a main—perhaps the main— subject of traditional history, historians have only newly turned their attention to criminal homicide.

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University, 1997. 399p.