David Gagne delivers a report on homicide rates in the Americas, south of the American border. The highest?
El Salvador:El Salvador tallied 3,942 murders in 2014, according to the country’s forensic unit Medicina Legal, a 57 percent increase from the previous year. While El Salvador‘s forensic unit states that the country’s homicide rate is 68.6 per 100,000, if that figure is calculated using the World Bank’s 2013 estimated population for the country, it would be around 61.7 per 100,000.
The disintegration of the 2012 gang truce between the country’s most powerful street gangs, Barrio 18 and MS13, was widely considered the principal reason for El Salvador‘s elevated homicide rate in 2014. The failed truce was also credited with having reduced the country’s murder rate from 70 per 100,000 in 2011 to around 40 per 100,000 in 2012 and 2013.
The lowest?
Chile: Chile registered 550 murders in 2012 for a homicide rate of 3.1 per 100,000, according to statistics (pdf) from the UNODC. Chile is widely considered the least violent country in Latin America.
Here’s a lovely map:
David omits the smaller countries, such as (randomly selected) Guyana, so I did some research and discovered the website for the “Department of State – Bureau of Diplomatic Security“. With regards to Guyana,
The most recent information from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime lists Guyana’s 2010 homicide rate as 18.4 per 100,000 people — the fourth highest murder rate in South America behind Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil. Guyana’s murder rate is three times higher than the United States’.
No mention of the top of David’s list, El Salvador, but it’s not clear which year is referenced in the Diplomatic Security’s report, while El Salvador’s report is for 2014 and is stated as having doubled. This site claims the United States murder rate (2011) is 4.7 per 100,000 people. While using the homicide rate as a proxy for violent crime is not a good idea, it’s still interesting that our country, often touted as being terribly violent, is actually rather peaceful. Particular chilling is another report, also by David Gagne, on Brazil’s police violence:
A new report by a citizen security body in Brazil says that police have killed more than 11,000 civilians in the past five years — while the number of police killed during the same period nearly doubled — suggesting strategies aimed at lowering police brutality have not had the intended effect.
The report (pdf) published by the Brazilian Forum on Public Security — a body comprised of security officials, research centers, and NGOs — counted 11,197 citizen deaths perpetrated by both on and off-duty police in the country from 2009 to 2013, representing an average of 2,239 people killed by police per year over that period (see graph).
Presuming Brazil’s population to be 199,321,000, I calculate a police homicide rate to be .9 per 100,000 persons. The highly respected FiveThirtyEight website states that it’s difficult to get comparable statistics for the United States, as the FBI doesn’t collect them. I’m appalled, although I could see an argument that the FBI collecting such statistics would be a fox and hen house scenario. FiveThiryEight and The Daily Kos reference the Killed By Police website, which reports, from news reports, 111 people killed by police in March 2015.
