Uniform Crime Report Essay

The data for this study is from the Uniform Crime Report Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) for 2010 (ICPSR 33527). The SHR contains detailed information on criminal homicides reported to the police, including offender and victim demographics, offender count, victim count, weapons used, and offender relationship to the victim. Of the 13,300 homicides there are 8,760 with known offenders. The current research only uses cases with known offenders. The variables used are offender count, offender age, offender race, and victim count. By incidents 20% of homicides included co-offending, by participations 40% of offenders were co-offenders. The first variable analyzed is age of solo-offender vs co-offenders. Based on prior research it is expected that co-offenders will be younger, on average, than those who offender alone. As can be seen in figure one both co-offending and solo-offending peak in the late teen’s then decrease with age. Co-offending peaks just before solo-offending and has a

The first limitation is the data itself, because the SHR is part of the UCR there are inherent concerns. Due to the fact that the data is voluntarily submitted by different law enforcement agencies the FBI cannot vouch for any of it (Robison, 1966). There is also the matter of the dark figure of crime. The database only includes homicides known to police, it is possible that analysis would be different with a more accurate database. Of the incidents that are known to the police (13,300) this study only used offenses with known offenders (8,760), this also effects accuracy. Within this much smaller dataset there was missing information; of the 11,648 offenders, race was unknown for 135, and age was unknown for 615. Furthermore, the SHR database includes all forms of homicide, including murder, non-negligent manslaughter, and justifiable homicides. This means that the analysis contains data from incidents that are not considered