This project combines the conversation on the national crime rate with emerging discussions on the violence that the state perpetrates against civilians. To measure US lethal violence holistically, we reconceptualize the traditional definitional boundaries of violence to erase arbitrary distinctions between state- and civilian-caused crime and violence. Discussions of the “crime decline” focus specifically on civilian crime, positioning civilians as the sole danger to the health, wealth, and safety of individuals. Violence committed by the state—from police homicide to deaths in custody to in-prison sexual assault—is not found in the traditionally reported crime rate. These absences belie real dangers posed to individuals which are historical and contemporary, nonnegligible, and possibly rising. We present Uniform Crime Report data side-by-side with data on police killings, deaths in custody, and executions from sources such as Fatal Encounters, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the Center for Disease Control to produce a robust discussion of deaths produced through the criminal legal system. We ground this empirical analysis in a broader conceptual framework that situates state violence squarely within the realm of US crime, and explore the implications of this more holistic view of crime for future analyses.

该项目将关于国家犯罪率的对话与关于国家对平民的暴力行为的新的讨论结合起来。为了从整体上衡量美国的致命暴力行为，我们重新概念化了传统的暴力定义边界，以消除国家和平民造成的犯罪与暴力之间的任意区别。关于“犯罪率下降”的讨论专门针对平民犯罪，将平民定位为对个人健康，财富和安全的唯一危险。传统报道的犯罪率没有发现国家实施的暴力行为-从警察杀人，在拘留期间死亡到监狱内性侵犯-。这些缺席掩盖了对历史和当代，不可忽略甚至可能上升的个人的真正危险。《华盛顿邮报》，《卫报》和疾病控制中心就通过刑事法律制度造成的死亡进行了有力的讨论。我们在一个更广泛的概念框架中进行了这种实证分析，该框架将国家暴力置于美国犯罪领域之内，并探讨了这种更为全面的犯罪观点对未来分析的影响。