Marc Riedel

MURDER CLEARANCES AND MISSING DATA

ABSTRACT From 1960 to 1992, the percent of murders cleared by arrests in the United States has steadily declined from 93 percent to 65 percent. Previous research has focused on characteristics of police officers, police organizations, or third party participation in violence. The present study examines clearances from the viewpoint of victim and event characteristics and patterns of missing data. The data were drawn from the Victim Level Murder file maintained by the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority and consisted of 3,066 single victim murders in Chicago from 1987 through 1991. Results indicated that murders involving concomitant felonies were cleared substantially less frequently than nonfelony murders. This relationship was not affected by victim race, gender, or weapon used. There was interaction between victim age, murder circumstances and clearances. Analysis of missing data patterns suggested those cases lacking information on murder circumstances may involve both felony and nonfelony...

Clearing Murders Is It about Time

This study uses data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) to explore the impact of model selection on determining the association of victim-level and incident-level factors to the likelihood of homicide clearance. We compare both traditional operationalizations of clearance rates as well as the time to clearance as dependent variables in examinations of correlates of solvability in homicide cases. Using a different approach than most other analyses of this problem, the results affirm the consistency of some effects but also reveal some important differences when the aspect of time is factored into the model. Implications for analyses of efficiency and effectiveness of police response to homicide, cold-case analyses, and other strategies for solving crime are discussed.

The Application of Missing Data Estimation Models to the Problem of Unknown Victim/Offender Relationships in Homicide Cases

Homicide cases suffer from substantial levels of missing data, a problem largely ignored by criminological researchers. The present research seeks to address this problem by imputing values for unknown victim/offender relationships using the EM algorithm. The analysis is carried out first using homicide data from the Los Angeles Police Department (1994-1998), and then compared with imputations using homicide data for Chicago (1991-1995), using a variety of predictor variables to assess the extent to which they influence the assignment of cases to the various relationship categories. The findings indicate that, contrary to popular belief, many of the unknown cases likely involve intimate partners, other family, and friends/acquaintances. However, they disproportionately involve strangers. Yet even after imputations, stranger homicides do not increase more than approximately 5%. The paper addresses the issue of whether data on victim/offender relationships can be considered missing at random (MAR), and the im-plications of the current findings for both existing and future research on homicide.

Missing Data in Homicide Research

This article is an introduction to the special issue of Homicide Studies on missing data. The first section is an overview of the status of missing data approaches in homicide research. It begins by describing the importance of missing data estimation in homicide. This is followed by a discussion of missing data mechanisms, complete case analysis, imputation and weighting, and model-based procedures. The second section is a brief description of each of the articles in this issue. The conclusion describes the myth associated with imputing missing data, the use of missing data approaches in public records, the Supreme Court case that found hot-deck imputation acceptable for the census, and guidelines for handling missing data published by the American Psychological Association. This section concludes by describing the kinds of research that need to be done.

Homicides Exceptionally Cleared and Cleared by Arrest An Exploratory Study of Police/Prosecutor Outcomes

This is an exploratory study of exceptional clearances using homicide data from Chicago from 1988 through 1995. The focus of the analysis is on homicide cases in which the offender is detained by police, but later released because the prosecution refuses to prosecute. On the basis of a bivariate and logit analysis, it appears that cases barred to prosecution predominately involve either domestic altercations or other types of altercations.

Counting Stranger Homicides A Case Study of Statistical Prestidigitation

Although the Uniform Crime Reports consistently reports stranger homicides as less than 20%, television and the print media frequently report that stranger homicides account for 50% or more of all homicides. This article examines how such claims are generated, including the role of the Uniform Crime Reports itself. Based on adjustment procedures and careful coding of police records, the best estimate is that stranger homicides are between 18% and 25% of all homicides. Use of the wide variety of available missing-data estimation techniques is encouraged in future research.

Murdered children: A comparison of racial differences across two jurisdictions

In order to highlight racial differences in patterns of homicide with child victims, a comparison of murdered children under the age of 14 was undertaken for Illinois and Ontario. Comparison of a Canadian jurisdiction with a U.S. jurisdiction allowed analysis of culturally generated factors. The findings indicate that the rate of homicide against Black children in Illinois was much higher than that for whites in Illinois or for Ontario children overall. More interesting, some of the patterns that emerged suggest that white children in Illinois are killed in ways more similar to children in Ontario than to Black children in Illinois.

Arrest Clearances for Homicide

At the time Wolfgang (1958) completed his classic research on homicide, arrest clearances for criminal homicide in Philadelphia were 94%. Of the 588 criminal homicides between 1948 and 1952, only 38 cases were listed as uncleared. On the basis of police reports requested by Wolfgang from 18 U.S. cities, percent cleared by arrest ranged from 84.1% in Seattle to 98.8% in Buffalo, except for Pittsburgh (1949–1953), the period covered by the clearance statistics was from 1948–1952. Although the number of cases was small, Wolfgang did a simple analysis comparing cleared and uncleared homicides in a short (10 pages) chapter.

Special issue on elderly homicide: an introduction

The topic of elderly homicide is important for two major reasons. First, nearly every publication on elderly homicide indicates that we are closing in on a very large increase in the elderly population. Second, while the number of elderly homicides is small, they have a number of characteristics that differentiate them from other age groups of victims. Language: en

A Case-by-Case Comparison of the Classification of Law Enforcement and Vital Statistics Data on Homicide

This study uses data from the California Linked Homicide File as a basis for evaluating the validity and reliability of homicide data. Case-by-case comparisons of variables reported by both agencies indicate that agreement between law enforcement and vital statistics data is highest with classifying homicides and victim gender and race and lowest with classifying victim age, manslaughters, and police justifiable homicides. The findings from a multilevel analysis examining what types of cases are unable to be linked over the two data-collection systems reveal that homicides involving Hispanic victims, weapons other than handguns, and family members other than intimate partners and homicides involving felonies, other nonfelonies, and negligent manslaughters have a greater likelihood of not being matched across the agencies. Death investigation systems that use medical examiners also decrease matching. The need for qualitative research examining how classification decisions are made by police and medical examiners or coroners is discussed.