Homicide
Narrative
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Homicide captures the American public's imagination through popular culture. Since the pinny magazines of the 1800s captured the Six Gun Mystique and homicide, tales of lore glorified homicide. We know more today about the wild west, indian wars, and Jesse James than we do about the great American Civil War -- homicide on a horrific scale beyone measure. Many original records have been lost. Calculations show that homicides that occurred during wars or revolutions were less likely to appear in surviving records than those that occurred during peacetime, that homicides of African Americans and Native Americans were less likely to appear than those of European Americans, and that homicides were more likely to appear in newspapers after the advent of dailies and penny presses in the 1830s and 1840s. Homicide in the United States occurs more often than in other Western nations. We have a homicide society, compared to others, then. Murder occurs often enough that we see it as a routine event. Ask a Los Angeles Police Officer in a homicide department. Los Angeles homicide detectives see it daily. Sociologically, homicide rates should go down with a society's development. We know this from European sociology and history. In mideval times, homicide occured frequently compared with today's numbers. By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, European homicides were down a lot. Their national rates decline below 1 in 100,000. Of course, these figures do not recognize the terrible wars fought all over Europe in these centuries. Ironically, during times of war homicides decrease among the civilian population; even the United States experiences declines in homicdie during times of war. Studying homicide has its problems. If we were to look at forensic evidence to understand homicide we would error. Such "reduction" goes beyound the big picture, for example. Historical approaches give us some insight into homicdie. It is possible to measure and to compensate for differences, using the same matching-list technique that epidemiologists and demographers use to estimate the number of people who have AIDS. For example, the number of people in a particular census category, such as the homeless. A common objection to historical homicide estimates is that it is impossible to produce reliable rates for places that have small populations or few homicides. It would certainly be a mistake to make too much of a small community's homicide rate in a particular year: the homicide rate "per 100,000 persons per year" would be high if a single homicide occurred in a given year, while the following year it might drop to zero. Adding a time scale to homicide research proves useful. For longer periods of time we can expect more data; with more data, cumulative numbers for those at risk of death by homicide grows. A formula for producing such rates is: homicide rate = (number of homicides / population at risk) X 100,000. By extending research periods , reliable rates for rare homicides begin to filter out. If study periods are extended far enough, it is even possible to obtain reliable rates for rare kinds of homicide, such as spousal murder, in places where there were very few homicides to begin with, like eighteenth-century New England. Some researchers do not believe enough data has become available to make any strict claims. Such claims as finding the number of New England spousal homicides during the 18th century, for instance. A time and place where homicides seldomed occurred. The South and West become more difficult to study, according to these researchers. We need to keep in mind that during the 18th and 19th centuries great gaps in the database existed. It's back to Durkheim in France and his strict attention to methodical standards and national archives for suicide numbers. Nowheer elese did so great a project receive attention, especially in the US as it grew in great numbers with many ethnic groups. Even today, crime scene cleanup cronyism research proves fruitless when approaching county officials. The Orange County coroner's office refuses to cooperate with allowing number out. Most probably, most counties and states have not been well studied for particular answers to specific questions of individual researchers. With university researchers adding to the Phd ranks, we can surmise that more areas have been studied to date and have been studied thoroughly. We should expect minimum counts of their homicides. Rates showing regional patterns will prove out. In the Northeast and the Midwest in the nineteenth century, for instance, all the homicide rates among unrelated adults rose and fell in unison, whether in cities or in the countryside, in areas with many immigrants or few, in poor communities or in wealthy ones. The likelihood that these homicide rates would all go up and down together by chance in every northern jurisdiction studied to date-including places as different as New York City, Williamson County, Illinois (which was settled by migrants from the Upper South), and Holmes County, Ohio (which was heavily Amish and Mennonite)-is virtually nil. Similar patterns occurred in the Far West and for subregions in the South. Social science has an opportunity to learn something from these historical investigations into homicide by historians. It is time to figure out what may be going on We need to keep one fact in sight. Studying homicide means studying overt behavior. We have no way to look into the minds and souls of thousands of perpetrators; we have our numbers, dates, places, and circumstances. Another limitation of statistics is that too many interrelated changes occur simultaneously in human societies. Researchers measure influencing variables causing a special event. When explaining homicide, gathering relevanet statistics over long periods, then relating these statistics to various social contexts sometimes leads to robust patterns. At this point, hypotheses testing these patterns against similiar and dissimilar situations for proving their connections. Mexico: 26 Bodies Found In Abandoned Vehicles, Official Says React Important Law-enforcement officials said the men were found, shot execution-style, in two vans and a pickup truck abandoned near the Milennium Arches, one of the most recognizable landmarks in Mexico's second-largest city. Best known as the home of mariachi music and tequila, Guadalajara also sits on the main highway running through western Mexico from the methamphetamine-producing state of Michoacan north toward the Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa. In recent months, security officials and analysts have worried that the city could become a target for the Zetas drug cartel, which has been using paramilitary-style tactics and headline-grabbing atrocities in a national push to grab territory from older organized crime groups. "These acts of barbarism show how the war between cartels, and crime, is getting more brutal," Guadalajara's mayor, Jorge Aristoteles Sandoval, told reporters. A message was found with the bodies in one of the vehicles, said Luis Carlos Najera, public security secretary for the state of Jalisco. He provided no details, but Mexican cartels frequently leave threatening messages with the bodies of their victims as a way of sowing fear and taking credit for their actions. "It's sad to see what's going on," taxi driver Jesus Amado said. "We used to be looking at the problem from afar. Now we're not, we've got it right here." Officials initially reported that there were 23 bodies found. Ulises Enrique Camacho, a spokesman for the attorney-general's office, said Thursday afternoon that the toll had risen to 26. The bodies were found about a mile (1.6 kilometers) from the Expo Guadalajara events center, the site of both Pan Am Games events and the Guadalajara International Book Fair, which opens Saturday and describes itself as the world's most important Spanish-language book fair. The fair's website said it was expecting more than 600,000 visitors from around the world. Crime in this colonial city of some 1.5 million people was historically dominated by the powerful Sinaloa cartel, but the group's tight grip was shattered by the death of its regional commander, Ignacio "Nacho" Coronel, in a shootout with federal police in July 2010. Guadalajara's murder rate then soared as factions of the cartel known as the New Generation and the Resistance battled to control Coronel's territory and assets. Street battles have left hundreds dead in the city and surrounding areas. Killing slowed to a trickle during the Oct. 15-30 Pan American Games, which brought a massive influx of police and soldiers. Law-enforcement officials and analysts said they were nonetheless concerned that a Zetas onslaught could be imminent. Thursday's slaying bears the hallmarks of the Zetas, perhaps working in concert with the Resistance, said Samuel Logan, director of Southern Pulse, a risk-analysis firm specializing in Latin American organized crime. If the Zetas turn out to be responsible, the Guadalajara attack may be part of a sustained offensive against Sinaloa, he said. On Wednesday, 17 bodies were found burned in two pickup trucks in a strikingly similar attack in Sinaloa, the home state of the eponymous cartel. Twelve of the bodies were in the back of one truck, some of them handcuffed and wearing bulletproof vests. "I think the location is significant, that points in the direction of the Zetas," Logan said, although he cautioned that another cartel may well turn out to be have been responsible. "Maybe the Zetas pushing into Guadalajara creates the next major battlefront ... If it was the Zetas, they're going to continue pushing." Responding to a reporter's question, Najera told the Televisa television network that he believed the recent calm in Guadalajara was the result of an increase in security and not because drug cartels had struck a truce with each other during the games. He declined to comment on the possible motives for the slayings, saying only that investigators had "various hypotheses." ____
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