Features the full text of an article entitled "Homicide Trends in the United States," written by James Alan Fox and Marianne W. Zawitz and provided online by the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice. Contains a series of charts that describe homicide patterns and trends in the United States since 1976. Lists demographic trends by age, gender, and race.

Describes the rationale for and approach to a study of homicide in 8 U.S. Cities -- Atlanta, Detroit, Indianapolis, Miami, New Orleans, Richmond, Tampa, and Washington, D.C. -- that experienced different trends in homicide from 1985 through 1994. Begins with a focus on the community, using homicide as the "dependent variable" in the project's inquiry into context, policy, and homicide. Describes the project design and provides additional information on the hypotheses investigated, interview development and testing, and site selection. Also presents an analysis of the homicide trends in the selected cities. Includes a summary of key policy findings.

The Global Study on Homicide 2013 is based on comprehensive data from more than 200 countries/territories, and examines and analyses patterns and trends in homicide at the global, regional, national and sub-national levels. Such analysis is fundamental to understanding the various factors and dynamics that drive homicide, so that measures can be developed to reduce violent crime. The Study provides a typology of homicide, including homicide related to crime, coexistence-related homicide, and socio-political homicide. The nature of crime in several countries emerging from conflict, the role of various mechanisms in killing, and the response of the criminal justice system to homicide are also analyzed. A further chapter examines homicide at the sub-national level, and includes analysis at the city-level for selected global cities.

In American Homicide, Randolph Roth charts changes in the character and incidence of homicide in the U.S. from colonial times to the present. Roth argues that the United States is distinctive in its level of violence among unrelated adults—friends, acquaintances, and strangers. America was extraordinarily homicidal in the mid-seventeenth century, but it became relatively non-homicidal by the mid-eighteenth century, even in the slave South; and by the early nineteenth century, rates in the North and the mountain South were extremely low. But the homicide rate rose substantially among unrelated adults in the slave South after the American Revolution; and it skyrocketed across the United States from the late 1840s through the mid-1870s, while rates in most other Western nations held steady or fell. That surge—and all subsequent increases in the homicide rate—correlated closely with four distinct phenomena: political instability; a loss of government legitimacy; a loss of fellow-feeling among members of society caused by racial, religious, or political antagonism; and a loss of faith in the social hierarchy. Those four factors, Roth argues, best explain why homicide rates have gone up and down in the United States and in other Western nations over the past four centuries, and why the United States is today the most homicidal affluent nation.