Homicide and Assault

Homicide and Assault

• Homicide accounts for only 1 to 2 percent of the all violent crimes.

• Violent crime is the lest occurring offenses in our country but gets the most publicity.

Definitions

• Criminal Homicide: A term that encompasses murder and nonnegligent homicide.

• Murder: The felonious killing of one human being by another with malice afterthought.

Categories of Criminal Homicide

• First Degree Murder: Murder that was committed with willful, deliberate, and premeditated intent.

• Second Degree Murder: intentional and unlawful killing of another but without premeditation.

Homicide, Assault, and Family Violence

• Manslaughter: The unjustifiable, inexcusable, and intentional killing of a human being without deliberation, premeditation, and malice.

• Aggravated Assault: Inflicting, or attempting to inflict, bodily injury on another person, with the intent to inflict serious.

Psychological Correlates of Homicide

• Race and Ethnicity:

– Leading cause of death for African Americans males and females ages 14 to 34 is homicide.

– Over 80% of all homicides occurred Intraracially (meaning members of ones own race killing one another).

Psychological Correlates of Homicide

• The rates of homicide based on race reflect the social inequalities that exist, including lack of opportunities.

– Similar findings have been found in Canada among American Indians and Canadian Indians. Canadian Indians represent only 3% of the entire Canadian Population but 9% of the prison population.

Psychological Correlates of Homicide

–Gender Differences:• Statistics show that both white and black men are 4 times as likely to be a victim of homicide.

• UCR homicide rate regularly report 90% male and 10% female.

• Age Differences: – About half of all those arrested for violent crimes are between

the ages of 20 to 29.

– Homicide deaths for youth ages 15-25 have increased 300% in the past 3 decades, to become the second leading cause of death for this age group.

– The fastest growing group of victims and perpatrators of violent crime are African American Males age 18 to 22.

– The median age of homicide victims in the US is 29.

Socioeconomic Class and Homicide

– Research shows that violent crime appears to be associated with SES.

– Elliot found that youth from low SES communities commit a higher rate of serious crimes in comparison to other youth.

Victim Offender Relationships

– In two-thirds of all homicides the offender and victim know one another.

– In only about 14-19% of the cases was the victim unknown to the offender.

– In 2008 nearly half of the victims and offenders knew each other.

– Women are most often killed by a husband or a boyfriend

– 30% of murders in 2008 resulted from arguments while 17% resulted in felonies.

– Men are more often victims of stranger homicide than women.

– Stranger homicide offenders are most often young and likely to be a different race then their victim.

Weapons and Homicide

– Guns and knives are the most often used weapons in homicides.

– Firearms are used in 69% of the homicides across the US, with people most often using a handgun

Other Factors and Homicide

– Temporal Factors: Homicides usually occur equally across the 12 months, however, they do increase during the Christmas moths and in the summer.

– Homicides are more likely to occur between 8PM Saturday and 2 AM Sunday.

Other Factors and Homicide

– Victim Precipitation: 26% of homicides are considered victim-precipitated, which means the victim participates in some significant way to his or her demise.

– Most of these homicides result from minor altercations and domestic quarrels.

– Usually the altercations start with a verbal squabble that escalates.

Other Factors and Homicide

– Alcohol: continues to emerge as one of the leading causes to homicide.

– Nearly two-thirds of all cases of homicides either the victim, offender, or both had been drinking prior to the event.

Sociological Correlated to Homicide

– Aggravated Assault is the most often reported crime on most college campuses.

– Over 80% of the violent crime sustained by college students occurred off-campus.

– About 1/3rd of violent crimes experienced by college students involved alcohol.