| Abstract: | Anthropological studies of community structures and human relationships of
today’s societies are becoming increasingly important for crime analysis. Law
enforcement agencies are often challenged with the task of connecting multiple locations
to persons involved in crimes to solve cases. Using the structures of the target
communities and the social relationship between the victim and offender, spatial
distributions of crimes can be reconstructed.
Data used in this analysis were collected from Hillsborough County, Florida
(n=420) and Lancaster County, Nebraska (n=48) law enforcement agencies within the
years 1997-2007. The hypothesis of this paper is: if the social relationship between the
victim and offender affect the spatial distribution of significant locations in a criminal
homicide, then by exploiting the relationship of the involved individuals, can one
acknowledge the possibility of generalized spatial configurations, depending on the type
of community in which it occurred? Geographic distance results are cross-referenced to
the relationship of the perpetrator to the victim, and scrutinized with frequencies, chi-
square tests, cross-tabulations, correlations, mean comparison, and descriptive statistics.
Results show similar frequencies of social relationship categories and the
frequencies of victim and offender sex. However, the mechanism of death, victim and
offender age differences, victim precipitation, and offender ancestries of domestic
homicides, co-habitation cases, and distances between locations differ between the two
communities. These variables’ frequencies and patterns show some variation between
the two regional settings. The goal of this paper is to identify the variables, through
assessing community structures and social relationships, which affect the rates of social
violence. |