International Homicide Rates

david dorkin ddorkin at aye.net
Wed Aug 18 14:09:15 PDT 1999


That's interesting-I was looking into the relationship between factors like neoliberal policy reform and homicide and crime rates in Latin America in particular.

Paul Wight wrote:
>
> I found a "United Nations World Crime Survey" some time ago, the address I
> have is
> http://www.ifs.univie.ac.at/~uncjin/wcs.html
>
> I was looking at the crime panics in the UK and had a hunch that somehow
> people were not becoming more violent or criminal, so I picked homicide as a
> reasonable measure of violence that seemed like it might be more objective
> and less susceptible to manipulation by whatever side. (A dead body is a
> dead body, you can't "up-rate " it to a more serious crime).
>
> For the UK I found the homicide rate to be static over the period of the
> surveys 1971-1996, at about 700pa (population did not move much from
> 55-60M). About 70% of these homicides are committed by an immediate family
> member or partner. (Despite public perception it looks fairly difficult to
> meet a violent end)
>
> Oddly, many other "reported crime" rates increased enormously over this
> period. For example, Attempted Homicide seemed to triple over the time that
> there was no increase in the "achieved" homicide rate.
>
> So either we are all trying to kill each other and have coincidentally
> become just as incompetent as we are murderous, or more likely to me it
> seems, all the other crime figures have become inflated by social factors,
> which are interesting to consider. There were quite a few other fun things
> in there as well. Mind if I ask you what your interest is?
>
> Regards,
> Paul



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