By Bea Brockey
While investigating clearance rates of homicides across the country this week, I stumbled across an article about victims of homicide in Los Angeles county that I found very interesting. Though I am new to the cold case team, I have started to notice trends in victim characteristics that contribute to faster clearance rates. Specifically, I have found some contradictions among studies across the U.S. about the role of race, ethnicity, and gender in homicide clearance but this article most captured my attention because of the ways in which it discussed the value of human life.
Published in the Journal of Criminal Justice and written by Catherine Lee, this article entitled “The Value of Life in Death: Multiple Regression and event history analyses of homicide clearance in Los Angeles County” examines the historical likelihood of a homicide being solved in LA and how this intersects with differing social factors.
The assumption made by the general public in the United States is that the police force is unbiased and justice-oriented but truthfully, as this article clearly demonstrates, there are some discrepancies among clearance rates that indicate that detectives in these cases place different amounts of value on different peoples’ lives. Specifically, the authors found that victims aged nineteen or younger, white victims, and females were more likely to have their cases solved (although this does not indicate the females are necessarily privileged members of society).
The author did not seek to explain why these differences occurred although it is somewhat implied that they had to do with discrimination (racism, agism, sexism etc.). However, the author was very explicit in mentioning just how clear the results are in demonstrating sociocultural values. Lee ends by saying, “Society makes choices about who deserves aid and protection in life when it provides, for example, income assistance or medical aid. Even after death, decisions about the value of life are made” (533).
This leaves me with questions about how we can go about solving these kinds of issues of value in the criminal justice system and so I leave you with a few that have been circling my head since reading this article: What are ways we can seek to address implicit and explicit bias in the criminal justice system and in ourselves? And in what ways can systemic problems of discrimination be fatal to minoritized groups? What can we do to change how the system which we as people with some degree of privilege are perpetuating?
Source: Lee, Catherine. 2005. “The value of life in death: Multiple regression and event history analyses of homicide clearance in Los Angeles County.” Journal of Criminal Justice 33(6):527-534