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2017 Homicide Rates in Latin America and the Carribean

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Re: 2017 Homicide Rates in Latin America and the Carribean

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: 2017 Homicide Rates in Latin America and the Carribean

#62
post #18
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry, I wasn’t clear - the correlation is from calculations at the census tract level, not the data linked. I did the analysis years ago.

Re: 2017 Homicide Rates in Latin America and the Carribean

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about pointing to several hundred years of systemic slavery and oppression without any meaningful reparation efforts?

African Americans were taller than whites in the years of 'systematic slavery and oppression'. Today they are shorter than whites. Slaves worked 89 percent as many hours per year as whites. [Trevon Logan]( http://www.econ.ohio-state.edu/trevon/pdf/Pres_Address_09-02... ) did an experiment seeing how much cotton his children could pick in a day and found that they picked 95% of what the slaves picked of the same age.…

> 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.

https://endsexualviolencect.org/resources/get-the-facts/wome...

Re: 2017 Homicide Rates in Latin America and the Carribean

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 cam…

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.

What would you suggest?

Re: 2017 Homicide Rates in Latin America and the Carribean

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Doesn't Venezuela have strict gun laws as well. I don't think private gun ownership is even allowed.

So how effective is that alone? It seems per capita income would be the prevalent factor.

Re: 2017 Homicide Rates in Latin America and the Carribean

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cam…

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. What would you suggest?

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.

Re: 2017 Homicide Rates in Latin America and the Carribean

#67
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Doesn't Venezuela have strict gun laws as well. I don't think private gun ownership is even allowed. So how effective is that alone? It seems per capita income would be the prevalent factor.

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.

Re: 2017 Homicide Rates in Latin America and the Carribean

#68
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't Venezuela have strict gun laws as well. I don't think private gun ownership is even allowed. So how effective is that alone? It seems per capita income would be the prevalent factor.

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…

> 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.

Re: 2017 Homicide Rates in Latin America and the Carribean

#69

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 crimin…

> Average citizens are afraid to even kill thieves and extortionists due to court prosecution. This is a good thing usually. What are you meaning?

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).

Re: 2017 Homicide Rates in Latin America and the Carribean

#70

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 crimin…

> Average citizens are afraid to even kill thieves and extortionists due to court prosecution. This is a good thing usually. What are you meaning?

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?

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