SHRs are the only nationally collected homicide data that include information on the victim, offender, and circumstances of each incident. Although SHR data are known to have important shortcomings, these data have been used extensively to describe the recent epidemic of youth homicide. The article discusses the methods used to collect and compare SHR data and data from the problem-solving project, presents the pictures of youth gun and knife homicide in Boston from the two data sources, analyzes the agreements and disagreements between the two pictures of youth homicide and concludes with a discussion of steps that might be taken to improve the usefulness of SHR data in diagnosing local homicide problems. Tables, notes, references