Homicide

This entry provides a definition of homicide and debates the two most widely used sources of homicide data, the Supplementary Homicide Reports ( SHR ) of the FBI 's Uniform Crime Reporting Program and mortality data from the Vital Statistics Division of the National Center for Health Statistics ( NCHS ). These data are then used to illustrate the changing nature of homicide offending in large US cities from 1976 to 2005, including a detailed account of the well‐documented crime drop of the 1990s. As reasons for the crime drop continue to elude scholars, however, racial differences in homicide trends are explored across this time period to illustrate how examination of total homicide rates masks the nature of the crime drop, ignoring diversity in trends and differences in life circumstances across groups based on race. A better understanding of the crime drop will require scholars to move beyond a general investigation of total homicide rates and explore homicides among distinct groups more closely. Both SHR and NCHS are rich data sources that provide the level of detail in homicide incidents that is critical to moving this literature forward.