By: D J Williams, Michael Arntfield, Kaleigh Schaal, Jolene Vincent

Over the past several years, an online community of self‐described “incels,” referring to involuntary celibates, has emerged and gained increased public attention. Central to the guiding incel ideology and master narrative are violent misogynistic beliefs and an attitude of entitlement, based on male gender and social positioning, with respect to obtaining desired and often illusory sexual experiences. While violence and hate speech within the incel community are both common, there exists a notable subset of incels who have been willing to act on those violent beliefs through the commission of acts of multiple murder. This study explores the demographic, cognitive, and other characteristics of seven self‐identified incels who have attempted and/or successfully completed homicide. The findings suggest that although self‐perceptions tend to reflect either grandiosity or self‐deprecation, homicidal incels share similar demographic characteristics and dense common clusters of neutralization techniques, cognitive distortions, and criminal thinking errors.

Behav Sci Law. 2021;1–16.

By: Ecaterina Balica

Objective. The present paper analyses the relation between the number of blows, location of wounds and the length between homicide and suicide in homicide-suicide (HS) cases committed in Romania in the timeframe 2002-2013. At the same time, the study presents the correlation between three types of HS (intimate partner homicide-suicide (IPH-S), filicide- suicides (FS), familicides-suicides (Fam-S) and the above mentioned variables.

Method. The data regarding the number of blows, location of wounds and length between homicide and suicide were extracted from the Homicide-suicides in Romania 2002-2013 database (N=132). The database includes information regarding all HS committed in Romania and the data were collected from the recordings of the Criminal Investigations Services, from criminal files in prosecutors’ custody and from articles published in online newspapers. The data analysis was done by using SPSS 22.0.

Results. More than a half of the suicides occurred immediately after the aggressor committed the homicide (N=71; 53.8%). In approximately two thirds of the cases (N=56; 57.1%), the death of the victim resulted from a great number of blows. Many aggressors preferred to hit their victims in the head area (21.5%) or neck area (22.3%) only. The most common suicide method recorded in HS cases was by hanging (34.8%).

Conclusions. The prevention of the HS seems to be a difficult task after the aggressor initiated the first act of aggression (the homicide). Therefore, prevention and intervention have to be focused on the initial phases of the acts of violence that precede HS.

Rom J Leg Med [26] 308-313 [2018]

By: David B. Johnson and Joshua J. Robinson

We explore the relationship between gun prevalence and homicides in the United States from 2003–2019. Unlike previous research, which typically uses an indirect, state-level measure of gun prevalence, we use a direct measure of guns in a narrow geographic area: gun dealers. We find an increase in gun dealer density is significantly and positively associated with increased homicides in subsequent years. We compare estimates from our preferred measure, the number of dealers per 100 square miles in a local area, to those found using other gun prevalence measures and find our preferred measure to be more consistent in magnitude across three different estimation methods and two different data sources. We additionally show the effect of gun dealer density is limited mostly to counties that have a high percent of Black residents. We propose that the so-called “Ferguson Effect”—a sharp increase in violent crime in urban and Black communities after 2014—might be partially explained by an influx of gun dealers in Black communities, rather than just a change in the propensity of Black residents to call the police or changes in police behavior.

October 1, 2021

By: Kacper Choromański

Currently, there are over a thousand unsolved homicide cases in Poland. Up to this point, numerous, mostly popular science, research papers have been focusing on the individual units in charge of these difficult cases. This paper, however, is an attempt to represent the current state of investigations that were discontinued due to the fact that the perpetrators could not be found, hereinafter referred to as Cold Case Homicides. This paper depicts both the researcher's perspective and the statistical side of such conduct. Furthermore, it presents the first results of a pilot study conducted among the prosecutors, concerning the problem of Cold Case Homicides from their perspective, the possibility of cooperation with the academics, and their opinion on the idea of complex research, concerning the reconstruction of events in this specific area of crime.

International Journal of Legal Studies No 2(8)2020

By Maury Nation

The author reports on the motivation for developing and performing the Nashville Longitudinal Study of Youth Safety and Wellbeing (NLSYSW) as well as the project’s activities and outcomes, and resulting artifacts. The work of the NLSYSW was organized into working groups corresponding to the principal required tasks to develop the multi-sectoral dataset. The four data collection working groups focused on the following: Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) administrative data; MNPS survey data; contextual data; and youth mapping data. Two data management working groups focused on data anonymization and data archiving. The report describes the major tasks of each working group, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic disruptions, and NLSYSW outputs and artifacts. The major output of the study was a compilation of multiple data sources with over two million observations and 450 variables; the report provides a list of data sources with the years of data included and a short description of each data set, and directs readers to the user guide and codebook sections for complete details.

Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University, 2023. 167p.

By Amanda J. Aubel, Angela Bruns, Xiaoya Zhang, Shani Buggs & Nicole Kravitz-Wirtz

Living near an incident of firearm violence can negatively impact youth, regardless of whether the violence is experienced firsthand. Inequities in household and neighborhood resources may affect the prevalence and consequences of exposure across racial/ethnic groups. Findings. Using data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study and the Gun Violence Archive, we estimate that approximately 1 in 4 adolescents in large US cities lived within 800 m (0.5 miles) of a past-year firearm homicide during 2014–17. Exposure risk decreased as household income and neighborhood collective efficacy increased, though stark racial/ethnic inequities remained. Across racial/ethnic groups, adolescents in poor households in moderate or high collective efficacy neighborhoods had a similar risk of past-year firearm homicide exposure as middle-to-high income adolescents in low collective efficacy neighborhoods. Conclusions. Empowering communities to build and leverage social ties may be as impactful for reducing firearm violence exposure as income supports. Comprehensive violence prevention efforts should include systems-level strategies that jointly strengthen family and community resources.

Injury Epidemiology volume 10, Article number: 24 (2023)

By Grahame Allen, Zoe Mansfield

This briefing paper looks at homicide statistics for England and Wales. It also covers equivalent statistics for Scotland and Northern Ireland, and other international comparisons. The paper examines statistics on the characteristics of victims and offenders, the methods used to kill and the outcomes for offenders.

London: House of Commons Library, 2023. 40p.

By Robert VargasFollow, Chris WilliamsFollow, Phillip O’SullivanFollow and Christina Cano

This Essay investigates Chicago city-government policy responses to the four largest homicide waves in its history: 1920–1925, 1966–1970, 1987–1992, and 2016. Through spatial and historical methods, we discover that Chicago police and the mayor’s office misused data to advance agendas conceived prior to the start of the homicide waves. Specifically, in collaboration with mayors, the Chicago Police Department leveraged its monopoly over crime data to influence public narratives over homicide in ways that repeatedly (1) delegitimized Black social movements, (2) expanded policing, (3) framed homicide as an individual rather than systemic problem, and (4) exclusively credited police for homicide rate decreases. These findings suggest that efforts to improve violence-prevention policy in Chicago require not only a science of prevention and community flourishing but also efforts to democratize how the city uses data to define and explain homicide.

University of Chicago Law Review: Vol. 89: Iss. 2, Article 5.

By Anu Koskivirta

"This work explores the quantitative and qualitative development of homicide in eastern Finland in the second half of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth. The area studied comprised northern Savo and northern Karelia in eastern Finland. At that time, these were completely agricultural regions on the periphery of the kingdom of Sweden. Indeed the majority of the population still got their living from burn-beating agriculture. The analysis of homicide there reveals characteristics that were exceptional by Western European standards: the large proportion of premeditated homicides (murders) and those within the family is more reminiscent of modern cities in the West than of a pre-modern rural society. However, there also existed some archaic forms of Western crime there. Most of the homicides within the family were killings of brothers or brothers-in law, connected with the family structure (the extended family) that prevailed in the region. This study uses case analysis to explore the causes for the increase in both familial homicide and murder in the area. One of the explanatory factors that is dealt with is the interaction between the faltering penal practice that then existed and the increase in certain types of homicide."

Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society / SKS, 2003. 217p.

By George A. Thacher.

Murder Myusteries Revealed. “I did not feel confident that the list was entirely accurate, but I realized that every day association with the prisoners probably made the designation of defective by these men worthy of thoughtful consideration at least. In jotting down the names of these prisoners I asked what offenses they had committed. In this list approximating 70 defective prisoners 36 were serving sentences for rape and of the 36 there were 13 who had raped their own daughters. One prisoner was serving his third term for this same offense. Seventeen of these prisoners were guilty of the offense which has made ancient Sodom a byword through the centuries. Six of these men had committed murder and all of the six were sex perverts. Naturally these defective beings often have a defective moral sense. My observation has often confirmed that fact. Kraft Ebing remarks that this psychic degeneration, however, has a more profound pathological foundation, because often it can be referred to distinct cerebro-pathologic conditions, and often enough is associated with anatomic signs of degeneration.”

Portland, OR: Press of Pacific Coast Rescue and Protective Society, 1919. 121p.