Stalking the Elusive Homicide

Abstract

Anyone who hopes to trace quantitative historical changes in populations faces the problem of incomplete and biased records. This is at least as much a problem for statistics of crime as for other kinds of statistics, and it plagues historical homicide research. As with other historical trends, those of homicide are derived from actual counts from some set of sources, including coroners’ records, indictments, arrests, and newspaper accounts. But what proportion of the original incidents were recorded and—if so—still exist? Adding sources usually increases the count, but how closely does it approach the true count? This cannot be known directly. One is caught between the facts that counting is the major means open to us to understand crime “as part of the sweep of history” (Monkkonen 1980: 53) and that there are gaping “holes in the historical record” that leave a large “dark figure” of crime (Lane 1992: 30).