Interesting crime (murder) statistics...

I saw a list of the top 10 countries by the highest murder rates and then decided to check out some U.S. cities as well and found it interesting.

I'm going to post the statistics off the top of my head so they aren't exact.

The country with the highest murder rate in the world was Honduras with about 90 murders per 100,000 population.

The country with the second highest murder rate was Venezuela at about 60 murders per 100,000 population. I'm posting this one just to show how Honduras has the highest rate by far.

The rate for the U.S. was about 5 per 100,000 population for comparison.

One of the highest murder rates of a city in the U.S. is Gary Indiana and for the year that I found the statistics for it was about 60 per 100,000 population which is approximately the same rate as Venezuela which was the second highest in the world

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So, I guess the lesson to be learned is that the U.S. is safe unless you go into a city and then it pays to chose the right one

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Seattle is 3.7 by the way.

 

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Ironically 7 out of 10 countries with the highest murder rates are directly attributable to the US. We support the ruthless drug gangs with our thirst for illegal drugs and we even supply many of the weapons to commit the murders.

 

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I get your point but I wouldn't go as far as to call it directly attributable. Honduras is number 1 and our military basically ran the country for years but all of Central American is a governmental mess regardless of drugs or U.S. involvement.

If not for the U.S. demand for drugs it would be something else. Venezuela which is number 2 is not primarily due to the U.S.

If the U.S. was out of the picture altogether I'm not sure the situation would be much different in kind.

I'm been to both of those countries and poverty and poor governance has much to do with it.

 

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The groups that benefit from the drug prohibition are the black market, defense lawyers, police, criminal justice, prison systems and politicians. This is big bucks for all these. Now medical, legal drugs, rehab and therapy get to cash in. These group will sales pitch the prohibition and an endless war, as best for the country, by inducing fear and outrage. The war on drugs is a really cash cow that is supposed to linger forever. The resistance to decriminalization is about protecting jobs.

If you wanted to win the war on drugs, all the government has to do is use simple free market principles. It would drop the price of drugs until nobody in the black market can compete and make money. This eliminates the black market and therefore need for lawyers, police, the injustice system and the prisons, since most of that system is co-dependent and justified by the black market industries.

Now with government the cheapest source, no casual user will choose to buy the more expensive. So you interface the lingering demand for drugs, with the medical and help industries, with the longer term goal of moderation leading to indifference. One has to overcome decades of political propaganda that were needed to steal tax dollars, via a system of fear, that was designed to fail and perpetuate a problem, so certain jobs were maintained that kick back to politicians.

 

Well if you choose to compare the US against global worst practice, it indeed comes out well. But just about all EU countries have a rate of 1:100,000 or lower. So one is five times more likely to be murdered in the US than one is in Europe. Of course, Wellwisher will no doubt point out that Europe is full of wishy-washy liberals that don't think it s a good idea for people to carry guns. They are too wimpish even to have the death penalty, to deter homicide.

Mind you, I'm entirely with Wellwisher about legalising drugs, illegal drugs being a significant cause of violent crime.

 

Never thought about it that way. I looked up the closest city to me and:
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For the fourth year running, San Diego had the lowest murder rate among the country’s ten largest cities. . . . San Diego, the eighth largest city in the nation, had a murder rate of 2.4 killings per 100,000 residents, according to data compiled by U-T San Diego.
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Cool! It must be all the microbreweries.

 

I agree regarding legalizing drugs.

Of course the point of my post wasn't to compare the U.S. against the world's worst practices. It was to show the world's worst (which I thought was very high) and then to show that several cities in the U.S. had rates just as high.

I put in the overall U.S. number and the number for Seattle just as a reference point since that's just where I happen to live.

 

There is no such thing as a Central American government "regardless of drugs or US involvement". The US systematically destroyed representative government in the entire region, because it was not anti-communist enough, and because it was attempting to tax and restrict US supported corporations. The US supported organized crime in the area, because it was rabidly anti-communist and did not tax or restrict US corporations.

Likewise Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Chile, and so forth.

Aside from criminal drug vending enterprises, and actually more significant than them: the major statistical correlation between violence and sociological/environmental circumstance is the one between violent crime and lead exposure in childhood. This continues to be striking in such countries as Venezuela - http://www.academia.edu/2971153/The_environmental_impact_of_leaded_gasoline_in_Venezuela

So if you are looking for clues as to why Gary, Indiana is so violent compared with some other US cities its size with comparable demographics, that's one factor to consider.

 

Here's a list of murder rates, by nation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate#By_country

The rate for the United State is 4.7/100,000.

There's quite a bit of variation by state. DC comes in at 13.9, down from a whopping 46.4 in 2002. The state with the highest murder rate is LA, at 10.8. Other states include NM 5.6, MD 6.3, MI 7.0, IL 5.8, GA 5.9, TX 4.4, CA 5.0, KS 2.9, NY a surprisingly low 3.5, CO 3.1, MT 2.7, WA 3.0, SD 3.0, WY 2.4, OR 2.4, NE 2.9, ID 1.8, UT 1.8, IA 1.5, NH 1.1

Australia is 1.1

That's NT 1.0, Tas 0.8, NSW 1.6, WA 1.6, Qld 1.2, ACT 1.1, Vict 1.4, SA 1.0

Canada 1.6

Broken down by province and territory, that's Nunavut 11.24, NWT 4.59, Manitoba 3.87, , Sask 2.71, Alberta 2.04, , NS 1.38, BC 1.66, Que 0.83, Ont 1.23, NB 0.93

Mexico comes in at 21.5, Brazil at 25.2

Russia at 9.2

The Cayman Islands 14.7

Greenland 19.4

Japan 0.3

Iceland 0.3

Some EU members:

Estonia 5.0, France 1.0, Germany 0.8, Belgium 1.6, Austria 0.8, Spain 0.8, Portugal 1.2, Malta 2.8, Italy 0.9, Greece 1.7, UK 1.0, Sweden 0.7, Norway 2.2, Lithuania 6.7, Ireland 1.2

The UN put the global rate for the entire planet at 6.2/100,000.

 

2.4? That's impressive. Seattle at 3.7 is good too. Seattle and San Diego are two cities that I like a lot. I believe that around here San Jose also has an extraordinarily low murder rate, for a city of its size (about 950K). That's because it's kind of a giant suburb, without a significant downtown. But it does have a large barrio and considerable Mexican gang activity, which generates most of the city's murders. If you steer clear of that, which most Anglos and Asians manage to do, there's only an infinitesimal chance of being murdered.

At the other end of the scale is Saint Louis, at 49.93, Detroit 44.87, New Orleans 39.61 and Baltimore 33.92

 

Fair enough Seattle. I admit I was being a bit provocative - partly because I had this vision of Wellwisher charging in with some inept comment about his beloved "liberals". Which hasn't happened. Yet.

 

The US has a lower murder rate than the planet as a whole.

Some EU nations do better than 1/100,000 and some don't. Russia and a few of the former Eastern European nations have higher rates than the US.

Here in the US, murder rates vary tremendously, ranging from the 60/100,000 in Gary that Seattle cited, to many communities with no murders at all and effectively a zero rate. The 4.7 for the US as a whole is an average, which obscures a great deal of internal variation.

I don't think that the observed variation correlates very well with how strict gun-control laws are. We find relatively low murder rates in states like Idaho, Wyoming and Utah, with relatively loose gun laws. Texas has a lower rate than California, despite Texas having some of most permissive gun laws in the country and California being notoriously strict.

What does correlate very well with murder rates in the United States is big cities. Murder rates correlate well with mental illness and with prevalence of 'substance-abuse' which are particularly common in large urban downtowns.

Everyone knows, but it's most emphatically not politically-correct to say, that murder rates correlate very well with the percentage of the population that's black. So the most dangerous places are found in large urban areas with large black populations. (Murder-rate champion Gary is adjacent to Chicago and something like 90% black. Saint Louis' murder rate is ten times the US average, Baltimore about seven times.) There seems to be weaker positive correlation with cultural diversity in general, though it depends on the nature of the diversity. Poor Mexicans and Central Americans produce lots of murders, like they do back home, while crime, including murder, is comparatively low in communities with large numbers of Asians. That's probably one reason why Seattle has relatively few murders for its size. It's diverse, but its diversity is more Asians than blacks.

All of this suggests to me that European murder rates are likely to creep upwards in coming years as immigration continues and communities lose their historical cultural homogeneity.

 

If you compare over time as well as place, you will find the correlation with childhood lead poisoning much more significant than the correlation with sociological race.

Right now in the US the correlation of childhood lead poisoning with sociological race (and urban settings) is very high, which leads to a variety of possibilities of spurious correlations with race.

Factor in the drug law enforcement (incarceration of older men, economic hit) and the entire racial issue all but vanishes.

 

There's an interesting article in this week's 'Economist', about conditions in American inner cities, that says that the murder rate in the west Baltimore neighborhood where Freddie Gray was arrested is (as I recall) an astounding 120/100,000. That's 1/3 higher than Honduras and half again Gary. One suspects that has something to do with why police seemingly patrol the place like it's Helmand province in Afghanistan.

The Economist dryly remarks (they're British) that if that neighborhood was a country, the State Department would have a travel warning, advising Americans not to visit.

At night, the gunfire starts as soon as the sun sets. Many houses are vacant, some gutted and with no market value. The few stores in that neighborhood often have their clerks protected behind bullet-proof glass.

But that being said, Baltimore hasn't entirely gone the way of Detroit (America's urban horror story). Not far from the urban combat-zones are Camden Yards (the attractive baseball park), upscale restaurants in renovated brick warehouses and prestigious Johns Hopkins University. But the latest rioting and the dark publicity resulting from it isn't going to help the city's hoped-for renaissance.

 

I give you extra points for quoting yourself!

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I'll have to check out that article...thanks.

 

Omaha seems out of place?

 

I guess it's because the absolute numbers are rather small (as are the populations). I looked into the Omaha thing and it's largely black on black gang violence. Although, I guess that's largely behind most of the high murder rate statistics in all of the cities.