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.
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.