Why Didn’t We Get Them All?

• DOI: 10.1177/1088767904265433
• Author: Jason Van Court,Roger B. Trent
• Date: 01 August 2004
• Published date: 01 August 2004
• Subject Matter: Articles

10.1177/1088767904265433HOMICIDE STUDIES / August 2004Van Court, Trent / CALIFORNIA’S HOMICIDE FILE

Why Didn’t We Get Them All?

Analyzing Unlinked Records in

California’s Linked Homicide File

JASON VAN COURT

ROGER B. TRENT

California Department of Health Services

The California Linked Homicide File links two major files containing information on

homicides. The basic file includes 34,542 cases from Supplementary Homicide Reports

(SHR). Using a probabilistic matching program, 32,122 (93.0%) of these cases were

linked with information from Vital Statistics (VS) death records. Why weren’t the

remaining 7% of cases linked? What makes these 2,420 records different from the cases

that were linked? Analysis demonstrated that many of the unlinked cases involved child

abuse and that many deaths appearing as child abuse in the SHR were not classified as

assault deaths in the VS death records. By broadening the definition of what kinds of

deaths in VS death records could be possible links with SHR reports, we wereable to mar-

ginally improve the overall linkage rate (from 93.0% to 94.2%) and to increasethe pool of

linked child abuse deaths by 7.1%.

Keywords: homicide; data linkage; California; SHR

Homicide attracts interest both from criminologists and public

health researchers. Tocriminologists, it is clearly among the most

serious crimes; to public health researchers, it is a major cause of

premature death. During the 1990s, homicide was the second

leading cause of death among people younger than 35 in the

United States, behind all unintentional injuries (falls, car crashes,

etc.). Because homicide victims are younger than victims of most

other causes of death, homicide is the fifth leading cause of

311

AUTHORS’ NOTE: The California Linked Homicide File was prepared and main-

tained through grants from the California Wellness Foundation and the Public Health

Foundation. This article is based on a presentation given at the Homicide Research Work-

ing Group annual conference in St. Louis in 2002.

HOMICIDE STUDIES, Vol. 8 No. 3, August 2004311-321

DOI: 10.1177/1088767904265433

© 2004 Sage Publications