Homicide and Medical Science: Is There a Relationship?

Abstract

Violent crime remains high in the United States and Canada. Some have hypothesized that there is a disparity between the trend of the rate of aggravated assault (as well as violent crime, in general), on the one hand, and the trend of the rate of homicide, on the other, and that this disparity can be explained by decreases in trauma mortality rates. This hypothesis is supported through the ‘‘lethality approach’’ that measures the proportion of actual deaths (homicides) relative to potential deaths (homicides and aggravated assaults) in criminal activity. The present article shows that the lethality approach is sensitive to data definitions and that there is no disparity between the trends of the rates of aggravated assault and of homicide.