Homicides in Chicago, 1965-1995 (ICPSR 6399)

Version Date: Jul 6, 2005

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Principal Investigator(s):
Carolyn Rebecca Block, Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority; Richard L. Block, Loyola University-Chicago; Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority

https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR06399.v5

Version V5

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Summary

These datasets contain information on every homicide in the murder analysis files of the Chicago Police Department for the years 1965-1995. For the victim-level file, Part 1, data are provided on the relationship of victim to offender, whether the victim or offender had previously committed a violent or nonviolent offense, time of occurrence and place of homicide, type of weapon used, cause and motivation for the incident, whether the incident involved drugs, alcohol, gangs, child abuse, or a domestic relationship, if or how the offender was identified, and information on the death of the offender(s). Demographic variables such as the age, sex, and race of each victim and offender are also provided. The victim-level file contains one record for each victim. Information for up to five offenders is included on each victim record. The same offender information is duplicated depending on the number of victims. For example, if a sole offender is responsible for five victims, the file contains five victim records with the offender's information repeated on each record. Part 2, Offender-Level Data, is provided to allow the creation of offender rates and risk analysis that could not be accurately prepared using the victim-level file due to the repeating of the offender information on each victim record. Offender variables were reorganized during the creation of the offender file so that each known offender is associated with a single record. A majority of the variables in the offender-level file are replicas of variables in the victim-level file. The offender records contain demographic information about the offender, demographic and relationship information about the offender's first victim (or sole victim if there was only one), and information about the homicide incident. Information pertaining to the homicide incident such as location, weapon, or drug use are the same as in the victim-level file. In cases where the offender data were completely missing in the victim-level data, no offender records were generated in the offender-level file. The offender-level data do not contain information about the victims in these cases. Geographic variables in both files include the census tract, community area, police district, and police area.

Citation

Block, Carolyn Rebecca, Block, Richard L., and Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority. Homicides in Chicago, 1965-1995. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2005-07-06. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR06399.v5

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Funding

United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. National Institute of Justice, Ford Foundation, United States Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. Bureau of Justice Statistics (3960D), United States Department of Health and Human Services. National Institutes of Health. National Institute of Mental Health (1R01M27575), Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, United States Department of Health and Human Services. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Joyce Foundation

Subject Terms

Geographic Coverage

Smallest Geographic Unit

city

census tract

police beat

police district

community area

Restrictions

Access to these BJS-sponsored data is restricted. Users interested in obtaining these data must complete a NACJD Restricted Data Use Agreement available from the ResearchDataGov website, specify the reasons for the request, and obtain IRB approval or notice of exemption for their research.

Restricted Data Use Agreements available on the NACJD website are provided for reference only. Please visit the ResearchDataGov website to download the appropriate Restricted Data Use Agreement and submit your request. Once approved, data may be accessed from a requester secure site via ICPSR's secure download procedures.

Distributor(s)

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
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Time Period(s)

1965 -- 1995

Date of Collection

1968 -- 1996

Data Collection Notes

  1. HOMICIDES IN CHICAGO, 1965-1981 (ICPSR 8941) is no longer available. Users interested in the data from ICPSR 8941 should obtain ICPSR 6399 instead.

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Universe

All homicides in the murder analysis files of the Chicago Police Department from 1965 through 1995.

Unit(s) of Observation

individuals

Data Source

Chicago Police Department records

Data Type(s)

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Original Release Date

1995-01-11

Version History

2018-02-15 The citation of this study may have changed due to the new version control system that has been implemented. The previous citation was:

  • Block, Carolyn Rebecca, Richard L. Block, and Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority. Homicides in Chicago, 1965-1995. ICPSR06399-v5. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2005-07-06. http://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR06399.v5

2005-07-06 For both Parts 1 and 2 day of death and day of injury were blanked and victim and offender ages were recoded to age categories for reasons of confidentiality. Files containing these data are now available only through the Restricted Access Archive.

1998-10-15 Part 2, Offender-Level Data, has been added, and the documentation and data definition statements were augmented to include the offender-level data. In addition, a small number of corrections were made to the victim-level file (Part 1).

1997-12-12 The data, documentation, and data definition statements were augmented to include the year 1995.

1995-01-11 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

  • Standardized missing values.
  • Created online analysis version with question text.
  • Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.

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Notes

  • The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.

  • One or more files in this data collection have special restrictions. Restricted data files are not available for direct download from the website; click on the Restricted Data button to learn more.