Homicide in San Francisco, 1849-2003

Kevin Mullen

The late Kevin Mullen was the author of several studies of crime and violence in San Francisco. Using newspaper reports for the years before the Great Earthquake of 1906 and homicide detective reports for the years after, Kevin has found that San Francisco's homicide rate has declined dramatically since the Gold Rush days. However, homicide rates for particular ethnic, national, and racial groups have followed complicated paths. Each major immigrant group, from Australians, Chileans, Peruvians, and the Irish in the frontier period to Hispanics, Asians, and Pacific Islanders in the present, has brought a distinctive set of values, beliefs, and experiences with them to San Francisco. Some groups brought more violent traditions with them than others did, and some experienced greater discrimination after they arrived. Together, tradition and the degree of discrimination shaped the homicidal history of each particular group, although Kevin believes the former played a more important role in shaping the behavior of first and second generation immigrants.

San Francisco's homicide rate is thus for Kevin an aggregate of the distinctive rates of the various social and cultural groups that have comprised San Francisco's population. His findings appear in Dangerous Strangers: Minority Newcomers and Criminal Violence in the Urban West, 1850-2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

The codebook is currently available in WORD. The data are described in the codebook and in the study from which the data are drawn. The data are currently available in spreadsheets for EXCEL (.xls), Comma Separated Variable files (CSV), and SPSS (.por).

The data are in the form that Kevin gathered and entered them.

Worksheets

Spreadsheets

[csv] - Some links on this page are to .csv files requiring the use of a database program. If you need these files in a more accessible format, please contact cjrc@osu.edu.

[doc] - Some links on this page are to Microsoft .doc files requiring the use of Microsoft Word. If you need these files in a more accessible format, please contact cjrc@osu.edu.

[por] - Some links on this page are to .por files requiring the use of a database program. If you need these files in a more accessible format, please contact cjrc@osu.edu.

[xls] - Some links on this page are to Microsoft .xls files requiring the use of Microsoft Excel. If you need these files in a more accessible format, please contact cjrc@osu.edu.