Rethinking Homicide (review)

In Rethinking Homicide, Terance Miethe and Wendy Regoeczi report on an ambitious and innovative study of homicide that employs data from the Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) for the United States as well as police narrative accounts from homicides in Miami, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and St. Louis. Noting that prior studies neglect the complex interaction of offender, victim, motive and circumstance, the authors comprehensively investigate the structure and process of thousands of homicides. Moreover, rather than examine typical questions such as "What city-level characteristics are associated with higher homicide rates?" or "Are the predictors of family- and stranger-perpetrated homicides similar?" Miethe and Regoeczi's situation-based analytic approach addresses other interesting questions such as: "Which combination of offender, victim, motive and weapon structures are most common?" "Are the most common homicide structures in the 1990s different from the most common structures of earlier decades?" and "Do instrumental- and confrontation-motivated homicide events share similar or distinct structures?" Overall, the research described is creative and the depth of the analysis certainly constitutes a worthwhile contribution to the homicide research literature. However, the substantive focus and theoretical framework of the book are somewhat narrow, which may dampen its appeal to social scientists working outside of criminology.

One of the major strengths of Rethinking Homicide is the innovative analytical strategy used by Miethe and Regoeczi to analyze literally hundreds of thousands of homicide events. Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) they effectively investigate some of the most common myths or assumptions about homicide and its distribution across demographic groups and time. For example, much speculation indicates that during the 1990s, homicide rates were being driven by the onset of juvenile "superpredators," an emergent group of youthful, male offenders who callously kill at random. However, by using QCA to analyze changes in the offender/victim/motive/circumstance profile of homicide events across the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, Miethe and Regoeczi illustrate that there is little evidence to support the notion of the rise of juvenile superpredators during the 1990s. Other common assumptions examined by Miethe and Regoeczi center on whether the structure of homicide incidents vary by race or gender, and whether conflict-motivated homicides have distinct signatures from instrumentally-motivated homicides.

Another strong feature of the book involves the use of police narratives of homicide incidents. By supplementing the QCA analysis of homicide structures with these descriptive accounts, important insights on the interpersonal dynamics and subtle nuances of homicide events are revealed. For example, an apparent assumption in prior homicide research is that homicide events can be neatly classified as having either an instrumental or an expressive motivation. Consistent with that assumption, the QCA analysis by Miethe and Regoeczi indicates that the vast majority of frequently occurring homicide structures can be classified as uniquely "expressive" or "instrumental." Upon inspection of the homicide narratives, however, it becomes evident that certain homicide cases, particularly those related to youth gangs and drug-market activities, exhibit a mixture of instrumental and expressive motivations. Thus, the narrative data indicate that the classification of homicide events by motivation type may not be as straightforward as prior studies suggest.

Despite the analytic strengths of the book, a couple of features detract from the overall package. First, the vast amount of data analysis in the central chapters is accompanied by little integrated theoretical discussion. Although an early chapter reviews potentially relevant theoretical models and the concluding chapter offers some discussion of findings in relation to criminological theory, the conceptual relevance of the research findings is scarcely mentioned in the rest of the book. As a consequence, it is easy to be overrun by the details of the data analysis. Second, despite all the virtues of the holistic event-focused approach in Rethinking Homicide, sociologists who read the book are sure to wonder what role the broader social context...