Talk:List of countries by homicide rate

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the List of countries by homicide rate article.
Article policies
Former FLC List of countries by homicide rate is a former featured list candidate. Please view the link under Article milestones below to see why the nomination failed. Once the objections have been addressed you may resubmit the article for featured list status.
To-do list for List of countries by homicide rate: edit · history · watch · refresh
  • Some historic data for Canada could be calculated using the murder data from Z21 here and the population from A1 here. I don't know if dividing 2 numbers counts as original research though, I hope not. JMiall 18:38, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
  • "more discussion of the differing methodologies used to gather the data" -- Zantastik, 2007-01-17t20:33z
  • 1998 and 1999 Trinidad and Tobago PDF -- Guettarda, 2007-01-21t04:20z
  • Search for individual countries' data, begining with African countries not on the map. -- Jeandré, 2007-01-21t06:31z
  • Incorporate Geni: "Reassessing the Cross-National Relationship Between Income Inequality and Homicide Rates: Implications of Data Quality Control in the Measurement of Income Distribution" - Steven F. Messner, Lawrence E. Raffalovich and Peter Shrock
  • "Demographic, Temporal, and Spatial Patterns of Homicide Rates in Russia" -- Jeandré, 2007-01-29t18:44z
  • South Africa 2006 -- Jeandré, 2007-01-29t19:27z
  • South Africa 2001/2002 - 2006/2007. -- Jeandré, 2007-07-21t11:04z

Contents

[edit] Sub national.

  • USA states 1995/2005 [1].
  • USA cities 2003 [2]. -- Jeandré, 2006-12-06t21:18z
  • Colomboa cities [co-ccr2005] p. 118. -- Jeandré, 2006-12-23t20:47z
  • South Africa, per police station and province 2006, 2007. -- Jeandré, 2007-07-21t10:37z

[edit] Moving article

Heya gang. I propose that we rename this article to "List of countries by homicide rate", and replace all instances of "murder" with "homicide" in the article. This is because "murder" is a very specific kind of homicide, and by definition would exclude manslaughter or unsolved killings. I'll do this in a couple hours unless somebody has objections. As I understand it, this article is meant to cover "killings", right? Please let me know if I am mistaken. -Taco325i 01:21, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

I don't know if this is correct. Possibly the reported rates are sometimes for all homicides and sometimes for just murder. For example, the latest figures for South Africa from the South African police (http://www.saps.gov.za/statistics/reports/crimestats/2006/categories.htm) give a murder rate of 39.5 per 100 000 for April 2005 to April 2006. Total murders pluse culpable homicides (the two catagories of homicide in SA law) are 66 per 100 000 for the same period. Since the murder rate has been declining in SA for the last few years, I assume that it is this rate that is reported in the figures, not the total homicide rate. Whether the article is headed murder or homicide, the figures probably need to be cleaned up. Brutus42 13:00, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

In my opinion it was definitely a mistake to move from murder to homicide as the definitions are different, and internationally less comparable. While all murders are homicides, not all homicides are murders. Also different countries include different criminal offences in their homicide data, including both conspiracy and abortion offences in some data sets and may often exclude traffic deaths. Murder is probably the most closely comparable statistic because most jurisdictions will count each person killed, whatever counting method they use. I would suggest having a page for each with notes about how each country's statistics are recorded. -- Cameron Dewe 11:45, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] And Iraq?

Iraq is not included in many of the lists. I think the ongoing violence and the different reports by different organizations might make it hard to find a reliable source. But still it should be included in the list.

This link might be useful: http://newsbusters.org/node/9932

Rmleon 02:44, 21 March 2007 (UTC)


I'm not being funny Rmleon but that NewsBusters article is TERRIBLE. I don't know the site, but unfortunately they gave the game away straight off with the subtitle at the top of the screen. There were more hostile civilian deaths in just Baghdad during 2006 than there were murders in the United States the same year. The guy's using obviously incomplete figures for Iraq (they've got better since but are still WAY incomplete) to suit his own thesis.

I think Iraq could be included on this list. The IBC has it's murder/hostile death rate (just for civilians) at 101 per 100,000 for 2006 and 89 per capita last year. What do people think? Sarcastic Sid (talk) 01:14, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] German figures are not correct

According to the chief of the Bavarian Police, the German homicide rate is twice as high as published by the German Federal Government. This is made possible by only accounting for those victims who die and are recovered in the same year. Also, ther German police only performs half as many autopsys as it should. So the real rate is above 2 victims per 100'000 citizens. Meswiss 08:30, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

That only accumulates to heresay, this is just republication of the government statistics. In addition to that there is no differentiation between the GDR and the BRD during the years of seperation.Spacedwarv 00:44, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Luxembourg figures are not correct

Luxembourg has a long history of leaving out those years where the number of victims would make them look bad. Meswiss 08:30, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] French figures are not correct

France numbers depend on politics and can not be considered ad valid. Many victims are never being accounted for using methods like Germany. Meswiss 08:30, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Homicide or Murder rates?

Are these statistics for homicide or murder? This page started of being called List of countries by murder rate then was moved to List of countries by homicide rate. However, in many juridictions these are two distinctly different sets of statistics, some of which indicate that only about a half of homicides are murders. This will account for the differences being reported above. There is a risk that poor definition of which sort of statistics these are will make this information useless as it will be untrustworthy. -- Cameron Dewe 11:27, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Does the blue map show the homicide rate or the murder rate? This article says homicide, but murder says its the murder rate. Emperor001 14:08, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] European Union

Don´t think that the number for the EU is that high. All of the "big" memberstate´s rates are bellow 2.37. So the EU number can not be correct. Perhaps this helps: http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/hosb1203.pdf 30.05.2007- 16:34

That Home Office document appears to be better researched than some of the other source documents used in the article. It gives a definition of what is meant by "Homicide" as well as giving caveats around the data. The rates given in the above home office document differ markedly from those in the article. To me it suggests two different sets of data have been used. The original statistics in the article were Murder rates. The Home Office data gives Homicide rates. These are different aggregations of crime, meaning the data in the article is now suspect, and probably inaccurate. -- Cameron Dewe 12:53, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Factor

Shouldn't another factor for the murder rate listed be the area of the country in addition to how many people there are. Aren't murders more likely to be committed when a large population is squeezed into a smaller aera? Emperor001 01:20, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Murder is such a rare event. For example Norfolk Island has had ONE murder in one hundred years! A large population, a large area, and a long period of time is needed to determine the murder rate. And it is only an average, with a statistical variation. From a statistical point of view, having a sample size of less than about 30 or so (murders) is pushing the envelope of statistical validity in any case. Murder rate statistics for some cities are published, mostly the capital cities of the countries concerned. However, I think crime rates per population (density) per land area unit is going to be a challenging one to find. Quite simply there is not the research out there on how population density affects crime beyond the observation the bigger the population the more crime. Crime researchers seem to agree that because crime is committed by and upon people, it is the population that affects the numbers of crimes, so compute rates per unit of population, not rates per land area. If population density was a major factor then it would be expressed that way in the first place. I suppose you could correlate population density with the crime rate, but I have not seen any research on the topic. Wikipedia is not about doing original research, but about reporting the findings of researchers. There are other factors that affect the Murder/Homicide/Crime rate that are probably more important - like counting the same crime the same way under different legislation. That is currently the problem with this page - Homicide is not always Murder and every country defines both based on their own legislation and counts the crime according to their own rules, not some standard set of rules somewhere. That is probably a lot bigger factor than close quarters living. It is not even the same in one country - for example Scotland counts the cases that have one or more offences of murder while England and Wales count each victim of murder. Thus the Dunblaine killings were one murder in Scotland, although 17 people were killed; The Lockerbie bombing was also a single murder, with 170 odd victims; While the terrorism of September 11th, 2001 was not even counted as a Homicide but as Terrorism! About the only other factor researchers appear concerned about is whether or not someone was killed (or murdered) by a firearm. -- Cameron Dewe 11:56, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] From a new Wikipedian: How the hell do you 'cite' sources??

I've been studying the tutorials for hours and I'm baffled. Basically I'm trying to get my source in the 'references' section so it can be verified, but have no idea how. Sarcastic Sid 04:17, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

EDIT: Don't worry I've got the hang of it. Sarcastic Sid 09:08, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Questionable UN report?

I removed the UN crime report on Colombia as I felt it contained erroneous info. It kept talking about most of Colombia's gun homicides being highly orchestrated and professional. It's my understanding the big percentage of both homicides and gun homicides to be poor slum dwellers feuding over the local drug trade, arguments in the street/bar fights, crimes of passion, street robberies etc.

Where I did agree was the ownership of legal arms doesn't seem to equate to a higher homicide rate. Apart from that it wasn't the Colombia I know. They may have lumped the youth gang violence in with organized crime too which would be a little disingenuous.

Colombia isn't a nation of psychos but to claim most of the gun killings are not unorganized, impulsive and/or indiscriminate is just wrong. What do people think? Sarcastic Sid 14:41, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

I think that this isn't the place to evaluate or discuss every other detail of the UN report or in general to debate the different perceptions about how gun homicides / violence operate in Colombia. It's still a perfectly valid source as far as homicide figures are concerned, as a lot of the figures in the article are also from UN docs. This article is just a list of homicide rates, after all. It's not dealing with the other details you've mentioned. Juancarlos2004 21:06, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Venezuela numbers

Most of the really violent countries I'm fairly certain include legal/police killings in their homicides - so I've done the same for Venezuela as they were seperate for that nation.

I don't know if anyone has seperated figures for all the worst countries but we are talking homicides (obviously not in the culpable or negligent sense) rather than murder rate. South Africa I believe also includes legal homicides in their official statistics, even though it's classed as the 'murder rate' rather than 'homicides' like Latin American countries. I'm pretty sure I read that on a reputable website a while back but if anyone knows for sure let us know.

Thanks. Sarcastic Sid 04:11, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Swedish figures are not correct

In sweden there is a big difference between reported killings and actual killings. according to BRÅ (the swedish branch of government that studie crime) the reported number is nowadays almost twice as large as the Actual number of homicides. This is due to some crimes being filed twice, murders abroad being filed in sweden, etc. If there is suspicion of a murder a murder is 'reported', and it stays reported even if it turns out to be suicide or just a mentally ill person who believes people are being murdered all over the place. The report (unfortunately enough in swedish) is here http://www.bra.se/extra/measurepoint/?module_instance=4&name=03061810981.pdf&url=/dynamaster/file_archive/050119/36f538e30fef8246c5215eb566559ca0/03061810981.pdf Since they do not give the numbers for all years I am reluctant to fill in the correct numbers since they only go up to 2002, which will give a hell of a jump in murder rates in 2003 =/

User thinking about getting registerd...

[edit] Pakistan ???

0,05 for the Pakistan ? Is a joke ? fr:Utilisateur:L'amateur d'aéroplanes —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.0.204.114 (talk) 10:00, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I don't think so. An unstable country (in a general sense) does not always have a high homicide rate. Pakistan has a large population, so even with sensational homicide cases (such as terrorist acts in the case of Pakistan), the overall homicide rate could be quite low. A smaller country can see its homicide rate skyrocket with just one person murdered while it takes hundreds of homicides for a large country to see any effect. Note that Pakistan's population is about 40 times that of Singapore's. Combining those information with this rate, it means that Pakistan has 4x case of homicides compared to Singapore, but because of larger population, Pakistan ends up with significantly smaller homicide rate. This obviously doesn't mean it's safer to live in Pakistan because other crimes are not taken into account. It just means that you are unlikely to be murdered in Pakistan. --Revth (talk) 04:02, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

From [3], according to INTERPOL data, the rate of murder in Pakistan was 6.86 (per 100,000 population) in 2000. Not sure why the large discrepancy with the UN data. --Vsion (talk) 06:01, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

There are now two Pakistan entries in the table —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.176.147.226 (talk) 19:01, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Deleted original and sourced Jamaican statistic from 1970's list

....a complete accident as I didn't know it was on there before I'd put in all the hard work, but I think my source is a lot more solid and it's every single year from 1970 onwards. It's also not the same stat stretched over two years like the other one, and it's still 10 per 100,000 like the original with 13 for the other year. To the guy or guys who put in Jamaican entries for the late 90's and 00's, I apologize if you had sources but at the time it was unsourced. Jamaica's murder rate in 2005 is also (as far as I know) universally recognized as being around 60 per 100,000 rather than the 45 per 100,000 that was on there. Regardless, I do apologize if you're work wasn't finished. -- Sarcastic Sid (talk) 19:57, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

More data is good, but Jamaica's 1980s, 1990s (1998 contradicts it's only ref: [14]), and 2001-2005 is now the only information not referenced in the article. Except for Jamaica everything else is either referenced to a cite next to the country name, or below the decade section: [13], [14], [25], [26]. Please add refs as soon as possible per WP:V. -- Jeandré, 2007-12-29t16:30z
I missed that reference. I don't know if people want to keep my data or use those three years in the UN report, with perhaps the stats I provided either side of them. The link I provided for Jamaica is on the 70's list, it goes right up to 2006 and it's meant to cover the 80's, 90's and 00's as well.
I don't know how you get the same reference number on the same page though, as when I try it comes up with a different No. for the same link. Would someone help us out with that? -- Sarcastic Sid (talk) 00:38, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
To reuse a ref you give it a unique name e.g. "foo2007": <ref name="foo2007">Foo, Bar. "Baz" 2007-12-30.</ref> and then you cite it again with with 1 tag that has a / at the end like <ref name="foo2007" />. I've done this for Jamaica. While I've sometimes used two diferent figures for 1 country with different refs, I've kept this to only the UN Caribbean ref instead of including the different UN year ref as well. -- Jeandré, 2007-12-30t19:02z

Thanks for that. I've filled in a few countries' rates for 2006 too. I keep missing those references next to the years but I'll look out for them in future. Thanks again. Sarcastic Sid (talk) 22:57, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Albania figures are not correct

Someone has put Albania down as '96.46' in 1995, '87.55' in 1996, and '296.39' in 1997. These are all incorrect. The link provided clearly show that the 'successfully completed homicides per 100,000' was '6.46', '7.55', and '46.39' respectively. You can see someone has been screwing around with the statistics by adding numbers to the front of the old statistics. --Delos (talk) 03:44, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Sorting seems broken

When sorting a column with the largest values at top, sorting happens alphabetically, thus leaving both "5" and "55" below "6". How should this be solved? Padding with zeroes? JoaCHIP (talk) 10:40, 10 June 2008 (UTC)