ABSTRACT
New York City is an attractive study site because of its size, age, unity of city and county boundaries, and historically consistent political borders. There was only one major political boundary shift: in 1898 the city and county expanded from Manhattan to incorporate the formerly separate city of Brooklyn, as well as the Bronx, Staten Island, and Queens. For the era between the Civil War and 1930, the coroner's office published annual counts of homicides. Both the coroner and the district attorney prosecuted homicides until the early twentieth century. For the whole of the twentieth century, the New York and US homicide rates, though on different trajectories, at least have crude parallelism in peaks and valleys. During the early nineteenth century homicide did increase and continued to increase after the years of heavy immigration beginning in the 1840s.
