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7 Crime Sci. 1 (2018)

handle is hein.journals/crimsci7 and id is 1 raw text is: Farrell etal. Crime Sci (2018) 7:1 https-//doi.org/10.1186/s40163-017-0076-y Crime Science H R TC Np Ac Homicide in Canada and the crime drop Graham Farrell , arah Hodgkinson2 and Martin A. Andresen2 Abstract In contrast to the Canadian crime drop of the 1990s, homicide appeared as an anomaly with a peak in the 1970s. Yet previous studies tend to refer only to completed homicides, and here we also include attempts. The resulting trend is remarkably similar to that in Canadian property crime for five decades. This seems unlikely to be a coincidence and we speculate about a causal link. Keywords: Homicide, Crime in Canada, Homicide in Canada, Crime decline, Crime drop, Crime falls, Security hypothesis, Debut crime hypothesis Introduction The existence of a Canadian crime drop is well estab- lished (Ouimet 1999, 2002; Pottie Bunge et al. 2005; Mishra and Lalumiere 2009; Farrell and Brantingham 2013; Hodgkinson et al. 2016) and similar to that of other high income countries (Zimring 2006; Tseloni et al. 2010). The homicide rate in Canada, however, has long appeared to be an anomaly, declining from the 1970s. The potential anomaly is important because it implies the drivers of homicide trends differ from those of other types of crime. Here we suggest that the apparently anomalous homi- cide trend is an artefact of the definition of homicide that has been utilised which included only completed homi- cides. We combine attempted and completed homicides to produce an aggregate trend, for the following reasons. In Canadian law most attempted and completed crimes are aggregated-an attempted robbery is considered as a robbery for example-and the only form of crime that is differentiated is homicide. In addition, it could be argued that since intent is often the same for attempted and completed homicides, their aggregation is preferable when the cause of behavioural change is sought. Other definitional issues relating to the distinction between serious assaults and attempted homicide are discussed in the literature (see e.g. Harris et al. 2002; Andresen 2007; Cook et al. 2017), but we suggest there is a strong case *Correspondence: g.farrell@leeds.ac.uk Centre for Criminal Justice Studies, School of Law, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 95T, UK Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Springer Open for adding attempts and completions together, particu- larly since the resulting trend is informative. The result- ing trend is found to closely track that of property crime over the last 50 years, and in recent decades the aggregate homicide trend is consistent with that of the more gen- eral Canadian crime drop. Data and methods The homicide data used here are from the Homicide Survey conducted by The Canadian Centre for Jus- tice Statistics of Statistics Canada and detailed in the report Homicide in Canada 2015 (Mulligan et al. 2016). Note that 'attempted murder' is the term used in offi- cial reports but for simplicity we use 'attempted homi- cide' here. We calculate total homicides as the sum of attempted and completed homicides. The property crime rates used here are from the annual Uniform Crime Reporting Survey (UCR Survey) and detailed in the report Police Reported Crime Statistics in Canada, 2016 (Keighley 2017). At the time of writing these are the most recently available sources. Data from 1965 to 2015 are examined, which is the period common to both data sets. The use of published data is, we suggest, a strength of this study: it establishes the independence of the data from the authors and adds transparency by allowing interested readers to peruse the primary publications for further methodological specifics as required. © The Author(s) 2018. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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