A new federal report discusses an unexpected theory for why murders are rising in U.S. cities

As a psychologist who is forced to work in the field of criminology because my research is on serial and unsolved homicides, I’ve had to hear most things Richard Rosenfeld has to say. That black males commit most homicides is just about IT, as far as criminologists are concerned. They cannot explain changes, do not include history, empirical psychology, studies of aggression or most of the past 30 years of research in the behavioral sciences. Look at the articles in Homicide Studies, and you’ll find how prevalent this mind-set is. I call it the “Wolfgang Paradigm” because it is the world view of Marvin Wolfgang, upon whose exemplar, untested theory, and trust in arrest statistics, they build their work. Serial murderers are even disproportionately black, according to one article in Homicide Studies, and when they were always regarded as white, suddenly race was obscure. The main point I want to make is that we cannot say who commits the majority of homicides because the large urban areas that criminologists study often have 75% if their homicides UNSOLVED. Thomas Hargrove’s Murder Accountability Project collected data on 211,000 unsolved homicides since 1980! Nowadays, many unsolved murders include either serial murders or their characteristics–lack of relationships or identifiable motives. Criminologists IMPUTE the characteristics of many of the unsolved homicides because otherwise, the “subgroup demographics” would not be the same. What a shame that would be! (Imputation methods vary, but some use the victims’ characteristics or the characteristics of solved murders, victims or killers, which are easy to solve and quite different from stranger homicides. This is an American problem, not one of subgroups demographics. Whites are quite capable of killing, as all of American history shows (e.g. Graham & Gurr, 1969).