Familicide is rare; however, the high victim counts in each incident and context surrounding these killings underscore the need for further research. The purpose of this study is to gain a better understanding of the circumstances surrounding familicide in Canada. Using univariate statistics, this study analyzed 26 incidents of familicide that occurred in Canada between 2010 and 2019. The results show that familicide is a gendered crime involving primarily male accused who often target female victims, have a history of domestic violence, and commit the killings using firearms. This research highlights the importance of developing risk assessment, risk management, and safety planning strategies to address warning signs and prevent future familicides.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) and intimate partner homicide (IPH) are complex global problems. Transdisciplinary research approaches offer the potential to increase the understanding of these events and inform best practices for prevention. To encourage scholars to adopt transdisciplinary practices when investigating multifaceted problems, this note employs a case study approach to detail one such effort-The Preventing and Assessing Intimate Partner Homicide Risk (PAIR) Studies. The goal of the PAIR Studies is to improve the understanding of IPH to inform the development of best practices for prevention. The note concludes with a discussion of the benefits of transdisciplinary approaches.

Criminologists largely rely on national de-identified data sources to study homicide in the United States. The National Death Index (NDI), a comprehensive and well-established database compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics, is an untapped source of homicide data that offers identifiable linkages to other data sources while retaining national coverage. This study's five aims follow. First, we review the data sources in articles published in over the past decade. Second, we describe the NDI, including its origins, procedures, and uses. Third, we outline the procedures for linking a police gang intelligence database to the NDI. Fourth, we introduce the St. Louis Gang Member-Linked Mortality Files database, which is composed of 3,120 police-identified male gang members in the St. Louis area linked to NDI records. Finally, we report on preliminary cause-of-death findings. We conclude by outlining the benefits and drawbacks of the NDI as a source of homicide data for criminologists.

Relative to studies of U.S. homicide trends, few have investigated cross-national trends. We explore hidden heterogeneity across a sample of 82 nations between 1980 and 2010, and examine (a) what distinct latent trajectories are represented among these nations? and (b) what structural factors characterize these latent trajectory groups? World Health Organization mortality data were used for the trajectory analyses wherein three distinct groups were identified. Structural characteristics of each group are compared to determine which factors account for their trajectories. Characteristics that predicted group placement include a development index, divorced males, female labor force participation, and Latin American region.

The term "Lone Actor" has been applied to a variety of violent individuals who are thought to act out of ideological motivations using terrorist tactics. So far, much of the research is U.S.-based. There is an empirical vacuum of Lone Actor violence in Europe and a conceptual gap in how these acts may be understood as a variation of homicidal behavior. We examine and compare characteristics of European Lone Actors to European "common" homicide offenders. Lone Actor terrorists constitute a heterogeneous group that is similar to homicide offenders but differs in terms of substance use, weapon use, and target. These findings may be understood in the context of instrumental versus expressive aims.

Domestic Violence Fatality Review (DVFR) teams are a means of identifying systems' gaps in the coordinated response to domestic violence. While the number of homicide reviews has grown, little is known about whether DVFRs facilitate change in the community-level response to domestic violence. This research evaluated whether the recommendations made by one state-level DVFR had an effect on community and organizational priorities and practices. The results indicate that the recommendations influence countywide priorities, but less was done to implement the recommendations. DVFRs have the capacity to influence community-level change agendas; however, organizations need support moving from issue prioritization to implementation.

This study surveyed malingering prevalence in pretrial homicide defendants and assessed the usefulness of the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) and the Rey 15-Item Memory Test (FIT) in detecting malingering among them. Malingering prevalence was 17%. MMSE and FIT scores were positively correlated. The MMSE and FIT had modest positive predictive value (67% and 43%), but reasonably good negative predictive value (93% and 89%), for malingering. Overall, the MMSE outperformed the FIT, with no advantage to combined use of the MMSE and FIT over the MMSE. The widely used MMSE, traditionally a bedside test of cognition, may have a role in malingering assessment.

In this report, we assess total and race/ethnicity-disaggregated patterns and temporal trends in elderly homicide (age 55-74) compared with younger age groups for the 1985-to-2009 period. To do this, we use California arrest statistics that provide annual homicide figures by race and ethnicity (including a Hispanic identifier) and by age. Major aims of our analysis are to establish whether (a) elderly homicide rates are different/similar across race/ethnic comparisons; (b) the elderly share of homicide and age-homicide distributions more generally differ across race/ethnicity; and (c) elderly rates of homicide and the share of elderly homicide relative to younger age groups is similar or different now as compared with 20 to 30 years ago. Our analysis is important and timely because some commentators have suggested that elderly homicide levels have been rising over the past one to two decades and because there is a virtual absence of research of any sort on elderly homicide trends that involve comparisons by race and ethnicity. Key findings are that elderly shares of homicide offending relative to younger ages have not increased (or decreased), that elder homicides continue to account for a small fraction of all homicides, and that these patterns persist across race/ethnicity comparisons.

A foundational implementation of the WHO/CDC Injury Surveillance Guidelines was conducted in Dar es Salaam region of the United Republic of Tanzania in 2005. The Guidelines were adapted to gather qualitative as well as quantitative data about intentional injury mortality which were collected concurrently at the Muhimbili National Hospital Mortuary. An interview schedule of 12 quantitative variables and one open-ended question, participant observation and newspaper reports were used. Mixed methods allowed an understanding of intentional injury mortality to emerge, even for those with the least amount of data, the 22% of homicides whose bodies were never claimed. Mixed methods made it possible to quantify intentional injury mortality rates, describe subpopulations with scanty data, and learn how to embed ongoing injury mortality surveillance into daily practice.

The current study evaluated a range of social influences including misdemeanor arrests, drug arrests, cocaine consumption, alcohol consumption, firearm availability, and incarceration that may be associated with changes in gun-related homicides by racial/ethnic group in New York City (NYC) from 1990 to 1999. Using police precincts as the unit of analysis, we used cross-sectional, time series data to examine changes in Black, White, and Hispanic homicides, separately. Bayesian hierarchical models with a spatial error term indicated that an increase in cocaine consumption was associated with an increase in Black homicides. An increase in firearm availability was associated with an increase in Hispanic homicides. Last, there were no significant predictors for White homicides. Support was found for the crack cocaine hypotheses but not for the broken windows hypothesis. Examining racially/ethnically disaggregated data can shed light on group-sensitive mechanisms that may explain changes in homicide over time.

This article examines the complexity of street gang homicides and focuses on situational factors that lead to gang members' susceptibility to this violent behavior within the context of a disadvantaged minority community. This study is based on an analysis of 28 homicides involving Mexican American gang members. The absence of immigrant youth involvement in these types of violent crimes is discussed. Findings demonstrate how locally embedded social processes associated with specific gang types, ecology, drugs, circumstances, and motives unfold into homicidal events. These findings may contribute to the development of street-based social programs focused on gang mediation, dispute resolution, and crisis intervention.

Social disorganization is the dominant framework linking neighborhood patterns of immigration to local rates of crime and violence despite inconsistent findings and evidence to the contrary. Using tract-level census data from 1970 to 1990 and Chicago homicide data from 1980 to 1995, this study explores whether and how the changing face of immigration is (un)related to homicide patterns within the contemporary urban environment. The results show that stable and consistent growth in foreign born is not associated with neighborhood trends in violence, whereas growth in recent arrivals occurs almost exclusively within the safest neighborhoods of the city. This research highlights the need to distinguish recent waves of immigrants/migrants from their historic counterparts.

This paper examines the connection of immigration and diversity to homicide by advancing a recently developed approach to modeling spatial dynamics-geographically weighted regression. In contrast to traditional global averaging, we argue on substantive grounds that neighborhood characteristics vary in their effects across neighborhood space, a process of "spatial heterogeneity." Much like treatment-effect heterogeneity and distinct from spatial spillover, our analysis finds considerable evidence that neighborhood characteristics in Chicago vary significantly in predicting homicide, in some cases showing countervailing effects depending on spatial location. In general, however, immigrant concentration is either unrelated or inversely related to homicide, whereas language diversity is consistently linked to lower homicide. The results shed new light on the immigration-homicide nexus and suggest the pitfalls of global averaging models that hide the reality of a highly diversified and spatially stratified metropolis.

Firearm violence is the end result of a causative web of individual-level and geographic risk factors. Few, if any, studies of firearm violence have been able to simultaneously determine the population-based relative risks that individuals experience as a result of what they were doing at a specific point in time and where they were, geographically, at a specific point in time. This paper describes the linkage of individual and geographic data that was undertaken as part of a population-based case-control study of firearm violence in Philadelphia. New methods and applications of these linked data relevant to researchers and policymakers interested in firearm violence are also discussed.