
2017 Homicide Rates in Latin America and the Carribean - mwgkgk
https://www.insightcrime.org/news/analysis/2017-homicide-round-up/
======
MichaelGG
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
> 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
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_ ).

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leovonl
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_federativa...](https://pt.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_de_unidades_federativas_do_Brasil_por_taxa_de_homic%C3%ADdios)

And this map with some of the highest/lowest homicide rates:
[http://55ca7cd0-f8ac-0132-1185-705681baa5c1.s3-website-sa-
ea...](http://55ca7cd0-f8ac-0132-1185-705681baa5c1.s3-website-sa-
east-1.amazonaws.com/defesanet/site/upload/media/1496719292_1.jpg)

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).

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quantumleap22
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
The difference between states is also fascinating:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_the_United_States_by...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_the_United_States_by_state)

From New Hampshire at 1.1, Hawaii at 1.3, and Vermont at 1.6 to Mississippi at
8.7 and Louisiana at 10.

~~~
afpx
There’s a strong negative correlation between latitude and crime. One
hypothesis is that people further away from the equator spend more time inside
annually, and thus have less opportunity for crime.

~~~
sulam
Alaska is next to South Carolina. DC tops the list. Both of these are
relatively small populations, but then you have Michigan and Indiana above New
Mexico.

If there's a correlation there, it doesn't seem obviously strong.

~~~
afpx
Sorry, I wasn’t clear - the correlation is from calculations at the census
tract level, not the data linked. I did the analysis years ago.

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pryelluw
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.

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baxtr
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_intention...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate)

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cvsh
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.

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randomdrake
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.

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antoncohen
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_b...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate)

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waytogo
Anyone knows the rates in the US or European countries?

~~~
danbruc
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_intention...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate)

~~~
DanAndersen
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-n...](https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/ppvx8g/a-closer-look-at-nunavuts-
notoriously-high-murder-rate-324)

~~~
adventured
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
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
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
Is there a reason you go to race rather than any other measure? I’d suggest
poverty as a better root cause.

~~~
adventured
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.

~~~
lostlogin
Are there any plans afoot to fix it or improve it? It’s been pretty bad for a
long time - I’m pretty sure some failed states have pulled themselves up in
the same time.

What would you suggest?

~~~
adventured
I keep tabs on Baltimore in particular, I spent some time around there growing
up. I'm sadly unaware of any serious plans to fix the city. Nothing with
substance or credibility.

Detroit is undergoing a modest recovery right now that is properly giving some
people hope that it could get better there. It has far more industry to pull
from than what Baltimore does, and it appears to have a spark to do so, a
cultural determination if you will. Baltimore right now is lacking that
aspect, it seems entirely adrift in a swamp of hopelessness.

If the Federal Government were smart, they'd shift a few major agencies over
to Baltimore and push resources into the city by doing so. Absorb some labor
slack, invest into communities, put resources into education and job training,
etc. It would make a meaningful difference, Baltimore isn't a massive city.
Just normalizing their high school dropout (~70% graduation rate, versus
closer to ~90% for the US) rate would probably do wonders for sparking
improvement.

If you look at what NYC accomplished, going from 1,200 murders to 1/5th that
over 25 or whatever years. They had vast resources to pull from to accomplish
that reformation. Baltimore is stuck between a classic rock & a hard place,
lacking the resources they'd need to do it.

The city mostly has itself to blame for ending up where it has, I'm skeptical
it can fix itself at this point. If it can, it'll take a very long time.
Failed states usually take a very long time to recover. Ethiopia took decades
to begin finding its footing after the disaster of the 1980s, and it's still
on a difficult course. One would assume Venezuela has decades of recovery
ahead of it, even if things stopped getting worse immediately. I consider
Baltimore a humanitarian disaster, which in the world's richest nation is
about a thousand notches beyond unacceptable. The Federal Government should
step in and effectively abolish Baltimore as we know it today and reform it,
put tens of billions of resources into the city, at the expense of all US tax
payers. It should set various standards for how to operate the city to try to
avoid it ending up right back where it is and gradually return control to
local governance. Little different than when the US Government steps in and
takes control over police departments (eg Seattle) when they effectively have
failed at their basic responsibilities.

