Society & Culture
The intention of this episode is to explain how the crime data in the USA is collected and reported to the FBI through the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the Supplemental Homicide Reports (SHR). Our guest speaker Thomas Hargrove, CEO of the Murder Accountability Project (MAP) located at www.murderdata.org, will discuss the importance of these data and how we should interpret them. He will also talk about his project of tracking unsolved homicides in the USA while directly relating to the research he has done for police agencies around the country. One such study called “Are Murders Worth Solving? A New Analysis by MAP” (http://www.murderdata.org/2018/01/are-murders-worth-solving-new-analysis.html), reflects what to some may be obvious but until now not supported by research. Simply stated, the more homicide cases a homicide unit does not resolve the more incidents of homicide will occur in that jurisdiction, increasing the workload exponentially. The inverse is: the more you solve, less will occur in the future to become cold cases.