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335. Crime stats

By Joel Jacobsen

The year's end always brings stories about crime stats.  The New York Daily News has a story headlined "New York started with 8 murders in 1887."  If you're tempted to believe that number reflects the real homicide rate that year, they were building a bridge for your purchase.  It might seem relatively easy to count up homicides in a densely-populated urban center, but the late Eric H. Monkkonen and Roger Lane have both documented the almost comical difficulty in ascertaining 19th century New York's (or, rather, New-York's) homicide rate.  The coroners records don't match those of the police, and neither tallies with the newspapers.One difficulty common to the era is memorably depicted in Willa Cather's masterprece My Ántonia, with the coroner debating  whether a dead man was murdered with an ax or shot himself...continue to full post

Full post as published by Judging Crimes on December 28, 2007 (boomark / email).