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Crime is indeed very high - murder rate per capita is 15 times higher than in the U.S. or 70 times that of United Kingdom. It is so high that the government ha
by ptaipale 10y ago
Crime is indeed very high - murder rate per capita is 15 times higher than in the U.S. or 70 times that of United Kingdom.
It is so high that the government has stopped publishing statistics, and also so high that "authorities would assign judicial police to Caracas area morgues to speak with families. At that time, they would advise families not to speak to report the murder of their family member to the media in exchange to have the process of recovering the victims body in an expedited manner. It was also reported that police would intercept the families of the victims and take them to the library of the University Institute of the Scientific Police (IUPOLC) where authorities offered families ways to "streamline procedures and advise them not to give information to the press in return for their aid"*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Venezuela https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Venezuela
The government also banned private handgun ownership in 2012. The number of murders has grown by about a third since that.
- kazinator 10y agoWhat? UK to US is 70:15?! How savage.
- erikpukinskis 10y agoThe U.S. is essential a colony and a colonizing nation in one unified land area. The U.K. maintained political separation with its colonies. If you include the British colonies in the statistics, it looks more like the U.S.
- dash2 10y agoI think this comment wins a prize for "most creative way to explain away the massive difference in murder rates between the US and most other developed countries".
- adventured 10y agoOr you could look at the murder rate by state, that's fascinating as well given the dramatic difference you see between them. Vermont, New Hampshire, Iowa, Idaho, North Dakota, Wyoming (about 8 million people between them) all have murder rates lower than Canada, Belgium and Finland. Maine, Minnesota, South Dakota, Hawaii, Utah, Oregon, Montana, Washington all have relatively low murder rates. I'd love to hear your explanation for what causes the wide variance between some states on murder rate.
- StavrosK 10y agoIs this stable? I'd expect some states to have low rates and some to have high rates by chance alone.
- adventured 10y agoIt's highly stable and has been quite consistent for decades of data. Those low murder states in particular have been extremely stable when it comes to being in the low bracket. Louisiana for example has had a high murder rate for a long time (as has eg Chicago) and states like Idaho, New Hampshire, Maine, Washington etc have had low murder rates for as long as the US has had meaningful data on murder. I'd argue the opposite, chance plays zero role when it comes to the wide variance in murder rates among states.
- tomwalker 10y agoWhy is there such a difference? Surely each of those states with low murder rates have good and bad bits?
- lanna 10y agoUK to US is 15:70, no?
- ptaipale 10y agoYes, approximately. Homicide per year per 100 000 people: U.K. 0.9 U.S. 3.9 Venezuela 62.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
- vacri 10y agoTo add a bit more perspective, the US is also an outlier amongst developed nations, who are almost all under 2.0. That 3.9 is not 'normal' (though it is something of an improvement on previous rates).
- adventured 10y agoIt's a lot more nuanced than that as well with the US. A very small portion of the US population lives in a location with a murder rate at 3.9 or higher, because murder in the US is hyper concentrated (a few areas of Chicago have more murder annually than all of Japan). People like to pretend the US is a wasteland of murder, when in fact the very extreme majority of people in the US live in areas with murder rates comparable to Canada.
- StavrosK 10y agoIs murder in other countries not concentrated? I can draw circles over a few areas in Japan and say "these areas here have 100% of murders, the rest of the country has a murder rate of zero".
- jpatokal 10y agoJapan does not have anything even close to what would be considered a high-crime US neighborhood, and the little crime there is fairly even scattered around the country: https://www.japanimal.org/culture-crime-map.php https://www.japanimal.org/culture-crime-map.php Unsurprisingly bigger cities have (slightly) higher crime rates, with each of greater Tokyo, Osaka/Kobe/Kyoto, Nagoya and Fukuoka clearly visible.