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2017 Homicide Rates in Latin America and the Carribean

63 points by mwgkgk 9y ago

waytogo 9y ago
Anyone knows the rates in the US or European countries?
- acidburnNSA 9y ago
  This has it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
- danbruc 9y ago
  You can find them on Wikipedia [1]. United States has 4.88, Europe varies quite a bit but the majority seems to be below 2 or 3. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
  - DanAndersen 9y ago
    I was surprised by the apparently high per capita homicide rate in Nunavut, Canada, but apparently it's mostly due to just how low the population is there: https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/ppvx8g/a-closer-look-at-nunavuts-notoriously-high-murder-rate-324 https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/ppvx8g/a-closer-look-at-n...
    - adventured 9y ago
      You get into all sorts of radical variances when you dig into locational data eg across the US. The common US murder rate where ~95% of the population lives, is closer to Canada typically, at around 1.5 to 2.5. Then you have extreme murder rate areas in the worst parts of eg Baltimore and Chicago that blow the scale up (Baltimore hit 56 per 100k for 2017, with more murders than NYC). Several dozen neighborhoods in those cities account for a truly incredible share of the US murder rate. People outside of the US commonly make the mistake of thinking most of the US has a 4.x murder rate, when that isn't the case; in the US murder is hyper concentrated.
      - jernfrost 9y ago
        It is like that in almost all countries though. Most countries have towns or cities with much higher than average rate. That is natural. Except e.g. the most violent city in Sweden has the same rate as the average in the US
        MichaelGG 9y ago
        What's the racial make-up of this violence in Sweden Vs the US? Sweden should have zero spots that rival US cities for violence.
        lostlogin 9y ago
        Is there a reason you go to race rather than any other measure? I’d suggest poverty as a better root cause.
        adventured 9y ago
        There are critical cultural break-down issues that drive outlier murder rates dramatically more than traditional poverty. That's why for example, the US hispanic murder rate is 1/3 that of the black murder rate, while hispanic poverty is quite high (most of the US hispanic population is sub 40 years old in terms of its existence in the US, and most hispanic immigrants were poor and with low skill levels when they came to the US). It's very clear that poverty is in fact not the primary cause, it's the collapse of poverty support systems in the cities in question (call it basic human infrastructure, or something). That system collapse leads to extreme desperation, which rapidly erodes a culture, which feeds on itself (~93%-95% of murders in St Louis are black on black murders for example), which prompts a vicious circle that becomes very difficult to break. Cities like Baltimore and Detroit are more like failed states, to so speak. They've generally suffered total breakdown in the neighborhoods seeing these incredibly murder rate numbers. For example, the Baltimore murder rate comes across as shocking at 55 per 100k. When you drill down further, it's far worse than that, because those murders are isolated to a small percentage of the city, neighborhoods that see dozens of murders each year. These are neighborhoods that have suffered total collapse, their cultures have been destroyed, support systems are no longer existent, and almost everyone is universally afraid to go near the problem (both literally and figuratively). Simultaneously in eg Baltimore or Detroit, you have very scarce resources to go around, the collapsed neighborhoods killing themselves are not going to get those scarce resources. As cliche as it might sound, it's very simply a downward spiral (and as one might expect, to break that, is dramatically more difficult and costly than to just maintain a healthy context in the first place). My suspicion is, the best way to fix failed cities like Baltimore, is direct, temporary Federal takeover, on the basis of a national interest. I don't see how it makes sense to pretend a city like Baltimore is an independent, functioning city any longer.
- almost_usual 9y ago
  Low at a state level, much higher at a city level. St. Louis city would be ranked above El Salvador with a murder rate of 65 for 2017. http://amp.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article191211704.html http://amp.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article191211704.... Population of St. Louis: 312,000
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- jernfrost 9y ago
  5 in the US, in my home country Norway it is 0.5 elsewhere in Europe it is around 1 I think.
quantumleap22 9y ago
For comparison, overall and by-race data for the US: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6631a9.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6631a9.htm
- adventured 9y ago
  The difference between states is also fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_the_United_States_by_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_the_United_States_by... From New Hampshire at 1.1, Hawaii at 1.3, and Vermont at 1.6 to Mississippi at 8.7 and Louisiana at 10.
  - _delirium 9y ago
    Some of that list is ordered how I'd expect, but I wouldn't have guessed that NY has significantly lower than US-average murder rates, and Alaska significantly higher. Interestingly both CA and TX are pretty much exactly at the US average, despite fairly different politics/policies.
    - almost_usual 9y ago
      NYC had one of the lowest murdered rates in 2017, St Louis city nearly had as many homicides as NYC. http://amp.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article191211704.html http://amp.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article191211704.... Population of NYC: 8,537,673 Population of St Louis: 312,000
    - IkmoIkmo 9y ago
      NY has restrictive gun-controls, is quite urban/dense and has the 2nd highest gdp/capita by state. They're all correlated with lower murder rates, that helps explain things a bit on NY. The one thing NY does have is high inequality measured in gini, the highest of all states. That usually drives crime/murder rates. But it's probably because of rich outliers (extreme upper capital class), rather than a big gap between lower-uppermiddle.
      - 9y ago
cvsh 9y ago
The color scheme here is really poor. It took me too long to realize that bright orange was not a step down from bright red, but in fact dark red, pink, and dark orange were between them. So the brighter red indicates more violence, but the the darker orange indicates more violence? Just use a single color gradient and spare us all the headache.
baxtr 9y ago
From the article: - Venezuela leads unsurprisingly with 89 per 100,000 - Chile has the lowest number, 3.3 per 100,000 Compare that to - Germany: 0.3 - US: 4.9 Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
pryelluw 9y ago
The Puerto Rico data does not tell the whole story. My island is 100×35 miles in size. It has a higher rate than Mexico. But numbers don't tell the whole story. I remember waking up and laying on the floor of my bedroom because there was a drug gang shootout with automatic AK-47s in front of my home. Seeing the blood stains of victims on a neighbor's walls (someone was executed against a wall). The sound of weapons always being a part of the night.
randomdrake 9y ago
I could not find official data yet for 2017, but they're missing a big one on this list and that's the United States Virgin Islands. 2015 brought 32.9 murders per 100,000 and they are consistently ranked as having one of the highest murder rates per capita of anywhere in the U.S. That's a U.S. territory with a higher murder rate than Brazil. This includes St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix. I lived there for only a few years and experienced the loss of two friends due to homicide in that short time, on an island that is only 13 miles long, and 32 square miles. Many of these crimes go unsolved despite such a small population, in such a small place, due to corruption, fear, and lack of resources.
leovonl 9y ago
It makes zero sense to look at nationwide average for Brazil to draw any conclusions without looking at per-state or per-region data. Northern region has places with 60+ homicide rate, southern region has places with 3-4 homicide rate. Take a look at this article: https://pt.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_de_unidades_federativas_do_Brasil_por_taxa_de_homic%C3%ADdios https://pt.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_de_unidades_federativa... And this map with some of the highest/lowest homicide rates: http://55ca7cd0-f8ac-0132-1185-705681baa5c1.s3-website-sa-east-1.amazonaws.com/defesanet/site/upload/media/1496719292_1.jpg http://55ca7cd0-f8ac-0132-1185-705681baa5c1.s3-website-sa-ea... Both in Portuguese but I think it's not hard to make sense of the numbers (rate is 1/100k, map colours describe increase/decrease in violence, bottom lines show current top/bottom rates in cities with 100k+ residents).
MichaelGG 9y ago
Guatemala numbers are less because they only count it as homicide if someone dies at the scene. If you manage to get into a hospital then die, it's not in the stats. There's no "fine tuning" of police operations in Guatemala. Everyone is incompetent, and the UN and other "human rights" groups fuck it up even more. Average citizens are afraid to even kill thieves and extortionists due to court prosecution. Said criminals continue to run gangs from inside prisons. Most "good" people just leave as soon as they can. My ex finally called it quits when Telefonica, the multinational phone company, got extorted. Someone calls them up, tells them they owe $X/week, and then just starts shooting employees. It's getting worse, not better. The only hope I've had here in recent times was several people, including young women, talking fondly about Rios Montt and how they wish a leader would come clean stuff up. Even a semi-indigenous person told me that (despite him supposedly being genocidal). Unfortunately GT has a preference for electing nitwits that can't even steal without getting caught. That's how incompetent they are. So it's unsure if we'll ever see a strong ruler come back in. But now more than ever are people ready for that. Turns out, when you can't safely walk around, when you can't start a business because any day you'll get a phone call that means either bankruptcy, death, or exile, yeah damn right you start preferring a military rule. As one woman told me, "at least I could walk anywhere, anytime with my purse and no one ever troubled me".
- lostlogin 9y ago
  > Average citizens are afraid to even kill thieves and extortionists due to court prosecution. This is a good thing usually. What are you meaning?
  - didYouNotRead 9y ago
    The implicit idea is that the courts uphold the letter of the law (an unnatural death is always somehow murder, prosecute impoverished people with a blanket policy of lenghty jail terms for any manslaughter at a minimum) without considering the spirit of the law (maybe some murders should be counted as self-defense, given that the constant ambient background noise of implicit corruption and disorganized chaos creates an environment of death by a thousand small cuts, making it profoundly difficult to obey the rules perfectly while keeping one’s head above the proverbial water).
antoncohen 9y ago
There are a bunch of interesting ways to break down homicide rates. I find by cities to be the most interesting, I think correlates stronger to how safe I "feel" in an area compared to national rates. Top homicide rate for cites in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate US cites (sort by murder): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

63 points by mwgkgk 9y ago

waytogo 9y ago

Anyone knows the rates in the US or European countries?

acidburnNSA 9y ago
This has it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
danbruc 9y ago
You can find them on Wikipedia [1]. United States has 4.88, Europe varies quite a bit but the majority seems to be below 2 or 3. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
- DanAndersen 9y ago
  I was surprised by the apparently high per capita homicide rate in Nunavut, Canada, but apparently it's mostly due to just how low the population is there: https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/ppvx8g/a-closer-look-at-nunavuts-notoriously-high-murder-rate-324 https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/ppvx8g/a-closer-look-at-n...
  - adventured 9y ago
    You get into all sorts of radical variances when you dig into locational data eg across the US. The common US murder rate where ~95% of the population lives, is closer to Canada typically, at around 1.5 to 2.5. Then you have extreme murder rate areas in the worst parts of eg Baltimore and Chicago that blow the scale up (Baltimore hit 56 per 100k for 2017, with more murders than NYC). Several dozen neighborhoods in those cities account for a truly incredible share of the US murder rate. People outside of the US commonly make the mistake of thinking most of the US has a 4.x murder rate, when that isn't the case; in the US murder is hyper concentrated.
    - jernfrost 9y ago
      It is like that in almost all countries though. Most countries have towns or cities with much higher than average rate. That is natural. Except e.g. the most violent city in Sweden has the same rate as the average in the US
      - MichaelGG 9y ago
        What's the racial make-up of this violence in Sweden Vs the US? Sweden should have zero spots that rival US cities for violence.
        lostlogin 9y ago
        Is there a reason you go to race rather than any other measure? I’d suggest poverty as a better root cause.
        adventured 9y ago
        There are critical cultural break-down issues that drive outlier murder rates dramatically more than traditional poverty. That's why for example, the US hispanic murder rate is 1/3 that of the black murder rate, while hispanic poverty is quite high (most of the US hispanic population is sub 40 years old in terms of its existence in the US, and most hispanic immigrants were poor and with low skill levels when they came to the US). It's very clear that poverty is in fact not the primary cause, it's the collapse of poverty support systems in the cities in question (call it basic human infrastructure, or something). That system collapse leads to extreme desperation, which rapidly erodes a culture, which feeds on itself (~93%-95% of murders in St Louis are black on black murders for example), which prompts a vicious circle that becomes very difficult to break. Cities like Baltimore and Detroit are more like failed states, to so speak. They've generally suffered total breakdown in the neighborhoods seeing these incredibly murder rate numbers. For example, the Baltimore murder rate comes across as shocking at 55 per 100k. When you drill down further, it's far worse than that, because those murders are isolated to a small percentage of the city, neighborhoods that see dozens of murders each year. These are neighborhoods that have suffered total collapse, their cultures have been destroyed, support systems are no longer existent, and almost everyone is universally afraid to go near the problem (both literally and figuratively). Simultaneously in eg Baltimore or Detroit, you have very scarce resources to go around, the collapsed neighborhoods killing themselves are not going to get those scarce resources. As cliche as it might sound, it's very simply a downward spiral (and as one might expect, to break that, is dramatically more difficult and costly than to just maintain a healthy context in the first place). My suspicion is, the best way to fix failed cities like Baltimore, is direct, temporary Federal takeover, on the basis of a national interest. I don't see how it makes sense to pretend a city like Baltimore is an independent, functioning city any longer.
almost_usual 9y ago
Low at a state level, much higher at a city level. St. Louis city would be ranked above El Salvador with a murder rate of 65 for 2017. http://amp.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article191211704.html http://amp.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article191211704.... Population of St. Louis: 312,000
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
jernfrost 9y ago
5 in the US, in my home country Norway it is 0.5 elsewhere in Europe it is around 1 I think.

quantumleap22 9y ago

For comparison, overall and by-race data for the US: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6631a9.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6631a9.htm

adventured 9y ago
The difference between states is also fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_the_United_States_by_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_the_United_States_by... From New Hampshire at 1.1, Hawaii at 1.3, and Vermont at 1.6 to Mississippi at 8.7 and Louisiana at 10.
- _delirium 9y ago
  Some of that list is ordered how I'd expect, but I wouldn't have guessed that NY has significantly lower than US-average murder rates, and Alaska significantly higher. Interestingly both CA and TX are pretty much exactly at the US average, despite fairly different politics/policies.
  - almost_usual 9y ago
    NYC had one of the lowest murdered rates in 2017, St Louis city nearly had as many homicides as NYC. http://amp.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article191211704.html http://amp.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article191211704.... Population of NYC: 8,537,673 Population of St Louis: 312,000
  - IkmoIkmo 9y ago
    NY has restrictive gun-controls, is quite urban/dense and has the 2nd highest gdp/capita by state. They're all correlated with lower murder rates, that helps explain things a bit on NY. The one thing NY does have is high inequality measured in gini, the highest of all states. That usually drives crime/murder rates. But it's probably because of rich outliers (extreme upper capital class), rather than a big gap between lower-uppermiddle.
    - 9y ago

cvsh 9y ago

The color scheme here is really poor. It took me too long to realize that bright orange was not a step down from bright red, but in fact dark red, pink, and dark orange were between them. So the brighter red indicates more violence, but the the darker orange indicates more violence? Just use a single color gradient and spare us all the headache.

baxtr 9y ago

From the article: - Venezuela leads unsurprisingly with 89 per 100,000 - Chile has the lowest number, 3.3 per 100,000 Compare that to - Germany: 0.3 - US: 4.9 Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

pryelluw 9y ago

The Puerto Rico data does not tell the whole story. My island is 100×35 miles in size. It has a higher rate than Mexico. But numbers don't tell the whole story. I remember waking up and laying on the floor of my bedroom because there was a drug gang shootout with automatic AK-47s in front of my home. Seeing the blood stains of victims on a neighbor's walls (someone was executed against a wall). The sound of weapons always being a part of the night.

randomdrake 9y ago

I could not find official data yet for 2017, but they're missing a big one on this list and that's the United States Virgin Islands. 2015 brought 32.9 murders per 100,000 and they are consistently ranked as having one of the highest murder rates per capita of anywhere in the U.S. That's a U.S. territory with a higher murder rate than Brazil. This includes St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix. I lived there for only a few years and experienced the loss of two friends due to homicide in that short time, on an island that is only 13 miles long, and 32 square miles. Many of these crimes go unsolved despite such a small population, in such a small place, due to corruption, fear, and lack of resources.

leovonl 9y ago

It makes zero sense to look at nationwide average for Brazil to draw any conclusions without looking at per-state or per-region data. Northern region has places with 60+ homicide rate, southern region has places with 3-4 homicide rate. Take a look at this article: https://pt.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_de_unidades_federativas_do_Brasil_por_taxa_de_homic%C3%ADdios https://pt.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_de_unidades_federativa... And this map with some of the highest/lowest homicide rates: http://55ca7cd0-f8ac-0132-1185-705681baa5c1.s3-website-sa-east-1.amazonaws.com/defesanet/site/upload/media/1496719292_1.jpg http://55ca7cd0-f8ac-0132-1185-705681baa5c1.s3-website-sa-ea... Both in Portuguese but I think it's not hard to make sense of the numbers (rate is 1/100k, map colours describe increase/decrease in violence, bottom lines show current top/bottom rates in cities with 100k+ residents).

MichaelGG 9y ago

Guatemala numbers are less because they only count it as homicide if someone dies at the scene. If you manage to get into a hospital then die, it's not in the stats. There's no "fine tuning" of police operations in Guatemala. Everyone is incompetent, and the UN and other "human rights" groups fuck it up even more. Average citizens are afraid to even kill thieves and extortionists due to court prosecution. Said criminals continue to run gangs from inside prisons. Most "good" people just leave as soon as they can. My ex finally called it quits when Telefonica, the multinational phone company, got extorted. Someone calls them up, tells them they owe $X/week, and then just starts shooting employees. It's getting worse, not better. The only hope I've had here in recent times was several people, including young women, talking fondly about Rios Montt and how they wish a leader would come clean stuff up. Even a semi-indigenous person told me that (despite him supposedly being genocidal). Unfortunately GT has a preference for electing nitwits that can't even steal without getting caught. That's how incompetent they are. So it's unsure if we'll ever see a strong ruler come back in. But now more than ever are people ready for that. Turns out, when you can't safely walk around, when you can't start a business because any day you'll get a phone call that means either bankruptcy, death, or exile, yeah damn right you start preferring a military rule. As one woman told me, "at least I could walk anywhere, anytime with my purse and no one ever troubled me".

lostlogin 9y ago
> Average citizens are afraid to even kill thieves and extortionists due to court prosecution. This is a good thing usually. What are you meaning?
- didYouNotRead 9y ago
  The implicit idea is that the courts uphold the letter of the law (an unnatural death is always somehow murder, prosecute impoverished people with a blanket policy of lenghty jail terms for any manslaughter at a minimum) without considering the spirit of the law (maybe some murders should be counted as self-defense, given that the constant ambient background noise of implicit corruption and disorganized chaos creates an environment of death by a thousand small cuts, making it profoundly difficult to obey the rules perfectly while keeping one’s head above the proverbial water).

antoncohen 9y ago

There are a bunch of interesting ways to break down homicide rates. I find by cities to be the most interesting, I think correlates stronger to how safe I "feel" in an area compared to national rates. Top homicide rate for cites in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate US cites (sort by murder): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...