Youth homicide in Boston: An assessment of supplementary homicide report data

Abstract

Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHRs) are the only nationally collected homicide data that include information on the victim, offender, and circumstances of each incident. Although SHR data are known to have important shortcomings, these data have been used extensively to describe the recent epidemic of youth homicide. This article compares SHR data on youth gun and knife victims submitted by the Boston Police Department to youth gun and knife homicide victim data collected as part of a problem-solving project designed to reduce youth violence in Boston. This article discusses the methods used to collect and compare these two sources of homicide data, presents the pictures of youth gun and knife homicide in Boston from the two data sources, analyzes the agreements and disagreements between the two pictures of youth homicide, and concludes with a discussion of steps that might be taken to improve the usefulness of SHR data in diagnosing local homicide problems. © 1999 Sage Publications, Inc.