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.

Lying with Statistics

Living here in Texas, I was kind of surprised when I saw this story that claimed Mexico was the 2nd deadliest conflict in the world last year.  What?  Really?  I read the story and it struck me that there was no discussion of the relative sizes of the countries being discussed.  The population of Syria is around 17 million while the population of Mexico is around 120 million.  Therefore, with 7 times the population, Mexico has seen less than half as many deaths.  One out of every 340 Syrians was killed last year vs. one out of every 5,200 Mexicans.  Rounding out the list, Afghanistan was the second deadliest with 1 in 2,100 killed, followed by Iraq with 1 in 2,500, and finally Yemen with 1 in 3,600.  Of course, St. Louis saw 1 out of 1,667 citizens killed in 2015, making that city deadlier than all of these countries except Syria.  See, I can use statistics too.

 

Someone started looking at absolute number of people killed rather than the ratio of people killed to population and decided on a shocking headline.  Not to minimize the large number of deaths that surround the drug cartels in Mexico, but it isn't in the same league with these Middle Eastern war zones.