Historical Trends in Police Homicide: Evidence from Hennepin County Coroners Records, 1911-1989

Michael Lansing, Augsburg College
Michelle Phelps, University of Minnesota
Evan Roberts, University of Minnesota

Historical trends in homicide have been central to the work of social science historians over the past fifty years. However, there has been relatively little attention to long-term trends in police-perpetrated homicides. Public attention to police homicide has increased in the past decade, and scholars have been able to document trends since the 1960s. Historical criminologists have shown that in the United States overall homicide rates declined unevenly over the first half of the century, and then increased significantly from the 1960s. Excepting Adler’s work on Chicago (1875-1920) and recent unpublished work on the 1930s, police-perpetrated homicides in the United States are unstudied before the 1960s. To better understand long-term trends in homicides by police, we examine coroner records for Minnesota’s largest urban county (Hennepin), which includes the city of Minneapolis, from 1911-1989, and extend the series to the present from other sources. Coroners records describe all deaths from potentially external causes, allowing us to count and describe all reported homicides, including killings by police, during this period. The data include descriptive information about the deceased’s age, gender, occupation, national origin, and cause of death as well as a “remarks” section where the coroner or medical examiner provides a narrative account of the death. Perhaps surprisingly, we find significant continuities with the present, including in annual police homicide totals, as well as substantial variation across years. To better contextualize these killings, we trace trends in different kinds of homicides across the decades, including the circumstances surrounding police killings. We find that police homicides rise and fall with broader social trends, from the spike in homicides during prohibition to police violence during episodes of major labor unrest. We link police homicide victims to the IPUMS MLP dataset of linked census data to provide further background on the lives of victims.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 202. Crime, Justice and the Law