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by waytogo 3074 days ago
Anyone knows the rates in the US or European countries?
4 comments

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...

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...

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).

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

Population of St. Louis: 312,000

5 in the US, in my home country Norway it is 0.5 elsewhere in Europe it is around 1 I think.