Appendix 1: Methods

Appendix 1: Methods rime, according to one useful definition, is any act of commission or omission C“in violation of a law commanding or forbidding it,” to which a penalty involving fine, imprisonment, or death is attached.1 That definition embraces a broad variety of activities, ranging from petty theft of a candy bar, to insider stock trading (much in the news these days), to the ultimate act of unlawfully taking the life of another human being. One definitional breakdown, that is used by the U.S. Department of Justice in its annual compilation of crime in the United States (Uniform Crime Report or UCR), is to divide crimes into those usually or potentially accompanied by violence (murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) and property crimes which, although considered serious, do not usually involve personal violence (burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and, more recently, arson).2 It was the seeming upsurge of violence thought to threaten the citizenry’s collective personal safety that commanded national attention in the late 1960s, set- ting in motion the massive examination that has since ensued. For that reason, most of the studies on “crime” conducted in the last several decades, including this one, have focused on crimes of violence. When researchers began to look to the past, they found that usable records for most types of crimes were spotty at best. One notable exception was the crime of homicide. Most societies have attempted to record the “ultimate” crime in some way, albeit often in ways that make the records less than totally useful to modern researchers. Because homicide records are most available, homicide is most often used as an index of the amount of violent crime occurring generally in a society.3 For the sake of precision, some definitional issues must be addressed further. In common usage, the terms “murder” and “homicide” are often used interchange- ably. They do not mean the same thing. Murder can be defined generally, in its simplest manifestation, as the unlawful killing of another human being with “malice aforethought.” Homicide is a much broader term and includes both criminal and noncriminal categories. Noncriminal homicides include killings in self- defense, justifiable homicides (as when a police officer lawfully kills a person in the line of duty), excusable homicides, accidents (most vehicular accidents), and those executed by legal process. Criminal homicide, on the other hand, the category used by the UCR to measure and compare crime in its annual report, is comprised of murders and nonnegligent manslaughters. For purposes of uniformity of 142 APPENDIX 1: METHODS comparison with other times and places, criminal homicide, as defined in the UCR, is the appropriate choice. Beyond that, problems remain for the scholar who wishes to compare modern rates as compiled by the Justice Department and those from times past. Until the development of the UCR in the 1930s, even homicide statistics were saved in ways that make comparisons difficult, and those records that were retained, even for homicide, are often incomplete. In the absence of full information, researchers have adopted a number of creative accommodations to the fill the void.4 Theodore Ferdinand used arrest figures in his study of Boston homicide, presumably all he had available.5 Arrest figures for nineteenth-century crime, although widely available, often do not reflect the actual incidence of crime of any type. On the one hand, they result in an undercount in those cases in which no arrest is made. The other side of the problem occurs when multiple arrests are made for the same event. As sometimes happens in high-profile cases, police “throw the book” at suspects to placate public feelings. On several occasions in San Francisco in 1890s, prizefighters died in the ring at a time when there was a lot of disagreement about whether boxing should be permitted for a purse. On one occasion, eight people were arrested for homicide in one case, everyone from the promoter to the water boy. Forever after, arrest figures used to measure the amount of homicide for that year would be inflated by 25 percent. Roger Lane addressed the problem by using indictments as a comparative measure of homicide in his studies of Philadelphia. This practice—as Lane was among the first to point out—suffers from the same problem as arrests.6 The use of indictments as a measure of homicide presumably gets rid of the excessive numbers caused by mass arrests that are thinned out before prosecution proceeds, but fails to get rid of the problem of an undercount based on cases where the perpetrator(s) avoid arrest or commit suicide. It often happened—even in the nineteenth century—that perpetrators were not identified, let alone arrested and charged. The San Francisco district attorney reported filing six homicide indictments (one manslaughter and five murders) in the first six months of 1883. During the same period, by actual count, there were nine criminal homicides, 50 percent more than those for which indictments were filed. As recently as the 1950s, as many as 90 percent of homicides were solved, assuring a high rate of indictments.7 A few decades earlier, however, when Brearly looked at the same phenomenon, he found a failure-to- solve rate of 36 percent in Chicago in 1926 and 1927, a rate no doubt attributable to the large number of unsolved gangland killings during Prohibition.8 In our own time, the problem is aggravated more because in only about 50 percent of homicide cases was a perpetrator even identified. In San Francisco in 1995 only 29 complaints were filed by the district attorney in the 100 cases of homicide. Despite our nostalgic ruminations about the good old days of the nineteenth century when, according to some, justice practitioners knew how to get the job done, it was not always a sure thing. Out of 22 known homicides in San Francisco in 1876, 10 went unsolved.9 So, of necessity, if arrests or indictments were used as the measure of homicide that year, almost half of the cases would not have been counted. Indictments and arrests, then, may be useful to show trends in homicide, APPENDIX 1: METHODS 143 but the problem comes in when the figures based on this sort of source are compared with those from sources with a more accurate count. Another source of information on homicide is the record of conviction and sentences in court proceedings. These are often available in court records that tend to be collected more completely than records of incidence kept by law enforcement agencies. But conviction and penalty data share the same problem as that on arrests and indictments in that they further reduce the number of cases considered. While still of some utility, the reduced number of incidents does not allow for comparison with modern records of incidence. By general agreement, the best, most complete source of data on the incidence of homicide is the records of coroner’s inquests listing the particulars on the victim and the circumstances of the death. Coroner’s records are not without problems of their own. In July 1916, a period during which coroner’s records in San Francisco remain intact, ten named persons are known to have died in the Preparedness Day bombing, yet only six of those are logged into the Coroner’s Register. In his history of Marin County, California, J.P.Munro-Fraser lists 31 homicides as having been committed between 1856 and 1880.10 The Coroner’s Inquest Book for Marin County, however, which purports to show all the inquests in cases from 1857 to 1910, includes only 13 (41.9 percent) of the known cases, calling into question, for Marin County at least, the adequacy of record keeping or record retention.11 Some researchers, like Clare McKanna and John Boessenecker, tend to count all homicides, including police shootings and executions, in their homicide counts. They also include extralegal lynchings. But if homicide rates are to be compared with current rates, they should to the extent possible be based on the same criteria. While technically criminal homicides, lynchings—which were particularly common in early California—inflate homicide rates in a way that makes the comparisons strained. The 47 lynchings that occurred in California in 1854 translate into a rate of over 15 per 100,000 of population by themselves. There was quite enough criminal homicide in California in 1854 without piling on the extralegal hangings, particularly when homicide rates are compared from jurisdictions to jurisdiction. And why should such extralegal killings be used to add to the homicide rates that are called up to justify their practice in the first place? Some researchers, Eric Monkonnen and Roger McGrath among them, restrict their counts to criminal homicides as defined by the Department of Justice. Monkkonen also excludes riot- caused deaths which, if included for the 100-plus deaths in the 1863 draft riot, would distort any comparison of what are essentially interpersonal crimes. A more horrific example would be the 3,000 deaths in the World Trade Center terror attack in September 2001. They were, by definition, all criminal homicides, and they happened in New York City, but they should not be included in urban crime statistics that are being compared with other jurisdictions. To the extent that the data is available, this study follows the criteria employed by McGrath and Monkkonen in counting “criminal homicides” as defined in the UCR. Where necessary, I also consider information on convictions and penalties. Where available, and usable for comparison purposes, I also consider other types of violent crimes, such as robbery, to make needed points.

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