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".
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).
It is a good thing in countries that are fairly low crime. In places where the criminals operate with impunity, we need a bit more reactive violence. If the police are useless, criminals should at least be worried about being summarily executed during their attacks on other citizens. Instead, it's backwards. Law abiding citizens have no recourse.
Civil liberties aren't worth much when you can't freely travel and live in the first place. Sure, a few innocents will lose out with an abridged justice system. But that's already happening at a high rate.
And sure, they could also just turn the country around. Get foreign countries to run ministries, get a whole new police force, increase resources to the justice system 10-fold. But tell me what's more probable, that, or just taking a hard stance, have swift summary justice and giving citizens strong defence rights?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Canada has far more restrictive gun control than NY, yet we are already on track to beat NY state in shootings this year with some cities having a 94% increase in violent gang offenses involving illegal handguns according to StatsCan. The difference must be policing and whatever gang strategy NY state has developed to get kids not to join them.
Could you reference me? Canada's murder rate is about 1/2 of the NY rate, and about 1/3rd of the US rate, and is about half of its peak 40 years ago. Canada has roughly the same amount of murders as NYS but the latter has 54% (let's say half) the population.
It's true that the rates are rising for a few years in a row, but this is nothing new. If anything, Canada's typical pattern is to see a rise a few years in a row, followed by a stronger drop. [0]
It's also true that gang related offences were part of the recent rise. But let's also note that they entail about 100 of the 600 murders in Canada, 15.5% in the last year for which I can find data. (2016). The vast majority of murders are done not by strangers but by friends or family, not related to gang violence.
About 95% of the world (not counting the US) has a lower per capita income than the poorest US cities.
Arguably the poorest US state, West Virginia, has a typical murder rate of around 3 to 4 per year per 100k.
Vietnam has been extraordinarily poor for the last half century, only recently beginning to climb economically. Its murder rate is typically 1 to 1.5 or so.
Per capita income probably only has a correlation in regards to the resources you have available to deal with crime problems if such presently exist, rather than being the defining characteristic of whether eg murder will be prevalent in a nation.
> About 95% of the world (not counting the US) has a lower per capita income than the poorest US cities.
Sure if the average salary in Vietnam is $150/month then yes per capita income is going to to be lower than the poorest cities in US. $150/month is a different story in NYC or SF. It would have to be adjusted for purchasing power or maybe just looking at poverty rates.
> So how effective is that alone? It seems per capita income would be the prevalent factor.
It isn't, alone, in a cherry-picked example. But ceteris paribus it's a explanatory factor.
I mean, one could also use your argument the other way around and question whether income is effective as a factor by itself. Cherry pick some country with similar levels of median wealth and a wildly different murder rate and gun laws. Like say the Netherlands and the US. Doesn't really prove a point, it'd be silly to now claim income isn't an important factor.
Here's one take-home message: if you made up a country which was 10% like Venezuela and 90% like Germany, then it would have murder stats double the USA.
It would also have a GDP much like the USA, and would qualify for the OECD.
Obviously this is just about how averages work -- the high violence stats of the 10% can completely skew the average, but their low income stats can't. But it's worth remembering, every time someone tries to tell you what an outlier among rich countries the US is. It's a large, diverse, country... and often different averages are telling you facts about completely different people & places.
Amsterdam has a murder rate commonly as high as the whole of the US. That isn't a rational comparison and isn't indicative of the murder rate of the Netherlands.
Yet millionaires sit having tea in St Louis right now with zero fear that they are in any danger. City metrics are as useful as state and country. Some places are safer than others. Usually determined by how much mONEY is available in that place to pay for armed force to keep it safe.
Try having a conversation with Europeans about how many trillions of dollars in reparations they owe black Americans and black Latin Americans (those that are descendants of slaves), for the millions of slaves their various nations/empires transported from Africa to North and South America over centuries.
It’s an internal problem first and foremost and progress needs to be made at home first. There are models to follow. New Zealand had been making slow and steady progress righting colonial wrongs. There have been many missteps and failures but the overall direction is positive. Important differences though - systematic and large scale slavery didn’t happen and the time frame during which the damage was done was shorter.
My point primarily is that, the discussion about reparations, is almost universally isolated to how much the US Government should have to pay. It almost universally excludes the nations that dominated the slave trade, such as Britain. Various rich, powerful European nations benefited massively from the economic output of the vast slavery they initiated and maintained, while suffering essentially none of the consequences, leaving the young US nation (and obviously numerous other nations in the Americas like Brazil or Haiti) to deal with those consequences ever since.
There's no scenario where you can propose the Netherlands should compensate slave descendants in the Americas, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars or more, where you're going to convince them to even have that conversation. People of the Netherlands today will simply tell you they had nothing to do with it, and should not be held responsible for past sins, and that's the end of the conversation (unless you want a small token sum to wipe away the guilt and grievance).
New Zealand’s problems due to colonisation stem almost entirely from the British government. It should be them paying to fix it and not New Zealand, with liability for actions that New Zealand pays for starting from when we governed ourselves. However this isn’t going to happen - Britain will never pay, so fixing it ourselves is the only course that repairs the damage that can be repaired. The sooner action is taken the better.
It’s simpler here because much of the harm done relates to land theft. Working out who you repay when people don’t necessarily know where they were kidnapped from and what they lost is not the same.
You didn't mention the African kings and chieftains who sold the captured members of rival tribes to the Europeans in exchange for guns and rum. The is a key link in the slave trade that is ignored in these discussions. If you think Europeans were walking into jungles and capturing slaves themselves, you are sorely misinformed.
Not sure I see any of that where I am but if you want to stretch that view, Africa gave us humans so who owes who? There is plenty out of Africa that has helped the rest of the world, why the blinkered view?
Edit: I see that your account is a throwaway that spends its time defending the slave trade.
Well that's actually precisely the problem and conversation that reparations always prompts.
Most people's hands are clean in a direct sense. Almost nobody in a developed nation has clean hands indirectly. Very few white people were slave owners or traders. How could one possibly account for the benefit a white (or black or asian) person in Britain today derives from British slavery in the 18th century? How could you possibly proportion reparations on any nation? Should a person that immigrated to Britain in 1978 from China, have to pay taxes to cover those reparations? Plausibly there's no way to deal with that fundamental issue that doesn't involve harming extremely large numbers of strictly innocent people, and the theoretical cost would be massive if you did attempt to do it (such that it would be guaranteed to be a tax on everyone across the board, regardless of race or guilt).
I've seen a lot of valid discussion of reparations in my lifetime. The topic itself is perfectly legitimate as a discussion matter. I've never once seen a practical way suggested that it could be implemented justly in regards to any of that nations that were responsible for the African slave trade.
Only 1.2% of the former slaves interviewed by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s reported having been raped by a master. Today, 22% of black women report having been raped.
According to Steven Crawford in "The Slave Family: A view from the slave narratives", 51% of black slaves had intact families. In 2011, only 37% of blacks had intact families.
> Today, 22% of black women report having been raped.
In the first search result I found for this, it says 18.8% of African-American woman are raped in their lifetime, 17.9% for Caucasian. They also indicate that some of the differences in numbers have to do with cultural perceptions of what constitutes rape and privacy about personal matters.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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
It's not like that in most countries in fact. The US variance between high murder parts of high murder rate cities and the murder rate for the other 95% to 97% of the population is several times greater than other countries with comparable murder rates.
The murder rate among Sweden's largest cities does not consistently vary by ~20-30 fold top to bottom. That's the gulf between New York City and Baltimore, or Honolulu and St Louis, or Detroit and Austin TX. That extreme of a variance, is very unusual for all but a few countries.
Argentina for example, which is at least somewhat similar to the US in per capita murders in a given year, in their major cities you do not see Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago type examples of extreme outliers vs the ~6 national rate (eg Buenos Aires is typically around 5 or 6, as is Cordoba). Rosario, which saw a large murder rate spike in 2012-13, was considered shocking, because the murder rate went from ~10 to ~22 over a few years. So the US national rate is lower than Argentina, while having drastically higher outliers like Baltimore and Detroit versus eg Rosario (their bad case example).
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.
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.
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.
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".