Almost all murders get reported, even in very screwed up countries. That makes it a very useful metric for comparisons across different places, and across time in the same place.
Without additional evidence, that police officer's statement isn't very helpful or credible.
In Japan there's no "murder" without a body. Most yakuza murders don't result in found bodies. Therefore Japan's "low homicide rate". Most of these murders aren't reported.
Here's an interesting NPR interview with an American crime reporter/author investigating Japanese organized crime: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1202372.... Some yakuza boss promised to pay money and inform the FBI on cronies in return for safe entry to/from UCLA for liver (?) transplants for himself and three others. After the transplants he didn't fulfill promises to the FBI. The author broke the story and has suffered consequences.
No, you'd be surprised at how many of the less obvious ones can get swept under the rug (and even the obvious, see recent Amy Bishop coverage). This happens in the U.K. to game the statistics, from what I've read.
I certainly would be surprised. Do you have any references? I recommend "Understanding crime data: haunted by the dark figure" as a good summary of the research on this topic.
It's easy to come up with anecdotes of particular unreported murders. The data shows that these are statistically very rare, almost every victim has a family who reports them missing even if no body is found.
Well, sort of by definition it's going to be difficult to go from anecdotes to statistics when the latter are being cooked.
That's only going to be possible when there is a mirrored and honest crime survey system, where as you point out most victims will report a missing person and matching dead bodies that are not ruled a homicides might be teased out.
As a completely uneducated layman, I'm skeptical of the link between murder and other crime. I thought murder more often than not is a crime of passion.
I'm not sure most of them are "crimes of passion", certainly most victims have a criminal past in the US. But, yes, it does seem to be not tightly linked to other violent crimes.
But we focus on it since it's the hardest to sweep under the rug, despite that happening a lot.
