Murder Rates

Lately, I have seen this posted repeatedly:

Interesting.  Sounds like an attack on Democrats and gun control supporters.  If true, this is a strong argument against both.  Let's fact-check it.

First step: Does the US really have the 3rd highest murder rate?  A quick search returned this link and it has the United States way down at 76th, not 3rd.  As of 2018, the US had a murder rate of approximately 5 per 100,000 people.  El Salvador had 10 times that number.  However, if we look at just the number of people murdered, the US ranks 6th with 16,214 murders.  Just looking at the piles of corpses, Nigeria is the most deadly with 64,201 people murdered in 2016.  Based on this, it looks like the maker of the above graphic may have been using murder totals rather than murder rates.

Next step: How many murders are there in the listed cities?  The FBI maintains crime statistics by city that are available here.  The most recent data available that includes all of the mentioned cities is for 2018.  Let's go with that:

That does amount to 12.4% of all murders in the US for 2018.  Doesn't seem like that would move the US from 3rd place to 189th place.  In order to test, we need to subtract those murders from the total and see where the US places then.  16,214 - 2,325 = 13,889.  After changing that on the table used in step one, we get... 6th place.  Yes, 7th place was Colombia with 12,586 murders.  The US position is unchanged.

Let's try the murder rate.  Sure, it was at 76th place when we used the murder rate, but maybe we'll move the needle by using that instead.  So, we'll have to take out those murders from the total and, to be fair, we'll need to factor out the populations of the listed cities to calculate a murder rate for the rest of the country.

Look at that.  Our murder rate has been greatly improved.  After plugging in 4.37 and resorting by murder rate, the US moves from 76th all the way to 82nd, putting us between Chile (4.405) and Latvia (4.356).  That is a far cry from 3rd to 189th.

Conclusion: the graphic is propagandistic crap.

Bonus Votes

During the effort to recount Michigan, it was revealed that some precincts reported a different number of votes than there had been voters.  Votes reported didn't equal ballots counted in the ballot box.  Oops!  Of the 3,047 precincts selected for recounting, 322 had such discrepancies.  That works out to 10.6% error rate.  Yikes, that's kind of high.  This article noted some counties that had higher error rates.  Ionia County - located between Lansing and Grand Rapids - had 24% of the precincts with a mismatch between votes counted and ballots submitted.  Of course, only 26,204 votes were cast there, accounting for maybe one half of 1% of all the votes cast in the state.  Then there was Branch County - on the Indiana border - which had 27% of the precincts mismatch. However, only 16,430 votes were cast, making it even less of a factor than Ionia.  Then we come to the worst offender: Wayne County.  A whopping 37.5% of the selected precincts reported more votes cast than there had been voters.  Of the 332 precincts with discrepancies, 248 were in Wayne County.  Therefore, 77% of the over-votes occurred in a county where Hillary won 66.8% to Trump's 29.5%, a margin of 288,934 votes.  This one county - out of 83 in the state - accounted for 16.1% of all the votes cast.  If you had to pick one county in the state where shenanigans could swing the state, Wayne County is the place.

 

So far, no articles list how many bonus votes were counted.  Did a precinct that should have had 500 votes report 501 votes or 650 votes?  Is this much ado about nothing or has major voter fraud been uncovered?  Will this be swept under the rug since the recount changed nothing and Trump has now been confirmed by the electoral college?  Whatever the case, Michigan needs to address the over-vote problem before the next election.

Detroit

The sad fall of a once great city can blame no one but itself.  For the last several years, it has spent $100 million more per year than it brought in.  The city has a long term debt of $14 billion.  All the projects meant to reinvigorate the city instead left it further in debt without spurring the economy.  The city is now in bankruptcy (there is some dispute on that).  One lesson is that the city could not spend its way out of an economic downturn.  Perhaps this could be noted by other politicians.

Of greater note, Detroit is rated as the most liberal big city in the United States.  It's last Republican mayor left office in 1961, when the population was 1.6 million.  Today, 52 years of Democratic rule, the population is 710 thousand, crime is the worst in the nation, the economy has collapsed, 40% of the street lights don't work, the city can't afford to demolish condemned buildings, and it takes nearly an hour for the police to respond to a call vs. the 11 minute national average.  There should be another lesson in this: Democratic policies lead to bankruptcy and ruin.  We are on the same path as Detroit on a national level.  This is where it leads.