Two examples in reading…

• Across 300 SMSAs – not individuals
• Economic inequality is not related to homicide
• Absolute poverty is related INVERSELY to homicide (abs poverty = % within the SMSA)
• Methodological explanations? SMSA is too big and masking important limitations? Or… types of murder not distinguished from each other (domestic vs. stranger) – you lose information when you don’t disaggregate… or… psychological leveling effect (behavior is sort of the standard) – so not as much frustrated desire

Example 2

• Across 125 cities; included 5000 black residents
• Racial residential segregation is related to black homicide rates; greater the racial dissimilarity, higher homicide rates in blacks
• Residence-based segregation leads to breakdowns in formal/informal social control; it’s cyclical – feeds on itself; cities in 1970s losing population – the people who moved were the ppl who could afford to; “white fight” – city becomes “poorer” – concentration of people at the lower end of class structure

CONFLICT

• Social contact (opportunity) is critical à bring victims and offenders together
• Central social dynamic element of causation
• Variation by type of murder
• In great majority of murders, victims and offenders know each other – 85%
• Generally, evidence of prior serious physical violence between victim and offender (55% in WA)
• Draw upon motivation to rationalize their crimes à really angry at the person
• Criminal behavior is an indicator of conflict within the person – it’s intra-personal, whether real or imagined
• Murder is resolved conflict.
• 3 types of intra-personal conflict among stranger killers:
  1) psychotic killers – struggling with demons
  2) serial killers – murders of strangers may be manifestations of conflicts with others earlier in life
  3) people who let real or imagined conflict build up and fester until it becomes an obsession (e.g. Columbine)
• Resolutions to conflict:
  1) stalemate
  2) both parties are happy = communication/compromise
  3) winner and loser
  (individual characteristics play a role)
• Routine activities
  - lifestyle
  - community you live in
  - daily activities
  - may seek out and create the opportunity
  - different social situations have different levels of volatility