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Raw data: Violent crime victimization in America

How dangerous is the United States? We certainly have far more homicides than most comparable countries, but homicides are quite rare and don't really have a big impact on overall safety. For that you need to look at violent crime more broadly.

Unfortunately, as with so many things American, you also have to look at race. The US is far more dangerous for Black people than white people. Very roughly, the violent victimization multiplier for Black people is nearly 2x the overall average. For white people it's three-quarters.

Here's how this looks internationally. Numbeo estimates violent crime rates via survey data, and I have my doubts that it's super reliable. But it seems to be approximately right, and for our purposes that will do. Here's what Numbeo's crime index looks like if we apply our race multipliers to their overall US estimate of 49:

For Black people, America is wildly dangerous, even worse than the otherwise #1 country of Venezuela. For white people, conversely, America is safer than average, sitting in between Germany and Spain. Safety, it turns out, depends as much on who you are as where you are.

32 thoughts on “Raw data: Violent crime victimization in America

  1. Austin

    Some of those countries - UK in particular - have significant numbers of “non white” people, so if you’re not going to break those out as well, comparing US (white) to the entirety of UK overstates murders for UK (white) people.

    Also it’s unclear if your US (white) includes Latinos/Hispanics? If it doesn’t, then comparing US (white) to, say, Chile or Venezuela also is disingenuous.

    1. xmabx

      I know when it comes to rape Sweden and Australia have two of the highest rates of rape in the world. But it’s not because they have more rapes rather they have put greater effort into building services to support reporting and both countries have the broadest legal definition of what constitutes rape so they have higher rates.

      Also Sweden is much much smaller than the US and has far fewer and more professional police departments so is probably better at collating nationwide data.

      Also I struggle to believe Spain has a lower rate of violent crime than Germany. Rather I suspect the infamously rule abiding Germans are more likely to report crimes than Spaniards who might not expect their less competent police to solve them. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19592372.amp

      1. MF

        Sweden now has a high rate of rape.

        This is an inevitable result of inserting large numbers of young single men into a country where they perceive normal culturally appropriate female behavior for that country as harlotry.

        1. Solar

          A supporter of the rapist incoming President who keeps surrounding himself with other rapists, pedos, and sexual offenders of all kinds, who feel they should control women's lives in all aspects, should STFU about what may or may not lead to increases number of rapes in a society.

          1. chumpchaser

            Motherfucker is a racist piece of shit, and the fact that he spends day after day sharing that fact with a bunch of people he knows hate his guts shows how much of that mindset is a result of deep mental distress.

        2. xmabx

          Yeah. It’s nothing to do with Sweden having one of the broadest legal definitions of rape in the world (the perpetrator doesn’t need to use violence, threats or coercion - the victim just needs to view it as non-consensual). It’s nothing to do with Sweden, unlike most countries, listing all reported rapes in its stats and not just those that are charged. It’s nothing to do with the systems it has set up to support women to report rapes. It has nothing to do with high levels of trust in legal institutions that help make people feel aafer to report. It has nothing to do with Sweden having one of the lowest rates of non-reported rapes in the world.

          The reason Sweden has amongst the highest reporting levels of rapes is all the single migrants. May I suggest that you consume less right wing media - few things in life are as simple as they portray them.

    2. Jasper_in_Boston

      Hard to believe that white people in the US are safer than the population of Sweden?

      It's not fully clear what is meant by "violent crime." Do drunk Swedes who get in bar brawls get charged with assault? Do Americans? How good are various countries at uncovering and reporting sexual assaults? A nation with a highly efficient and comprehensive sex crime reporting system could conceivably be "penalized" in the statistical safety stakes. And so on.

      I think for most people, "safety" first and foremost means not losing your life. So, I continue to have reservations about Kevin's preferred statistics in this area.

      That said, the notion that whites are considerably safer than Blacks in the United States is hardly surprising.

      1. xmabx

        Exactly. Swedens one and police department apparently reports all reported crimes in its national figures and not just that are investigated/prosecuted. Also I imagine the only and only national police department in Sweden manages its stats better than rural police departments in Iowa. Also there might be structural or cultural factors including trust in the police that encourages people to report crimes such as greater trust in police etc.

        Murder is the only crime we’re suspect you would get close to an apples to apples comparison without signicant massaging of data. Given it would be highly reported and investigated.

        Sweden has one of the highest reporting rates of rape and some of the broadest rape laws in the work so it’s not surprising it has a high per capita rate. Does it means it’s more dangerous than the USA? Almost certainly not.

        1. Jasper_in_Boston

          There's also the lack of crime "weighting." Even if Sweden actually does suffer a higher incidence of violent crime than the US, can the latter really be considered "safer" if its intentional homicide rate is 6 or 7 times that of the former?

          1. xmabx

            Exactly. Also I struggle to believe a country that has a murder rate 6 or 7 higher than an another has lower rates of every other type of violent crime.

  2. golack

    Poverty plays a role too.

    Minority communities want policing, not an occupation--and, as a country, were still having trouble doing that--hence the consent decrees.

  3. middleoftheroaddem

    Could you not, also, explain the US data by location.

    A white person in Memphis, or St. Louis (top two, most dangerous US big cities) is likely in a more risk than a black person in Augusta, GA or South Bend, IN (safest US big cities).

    Race and place, both have significant explanative value.

    Note, I used Google for my data and not sure South Bend is a big city.

    1. MF

      Race, place, and crime rates are not independent variables.

      Places with lots of blacks have disproportionately more crime and, obviously, black people are disproportionately likely to live in them.

  4. MF

    Most criminals are black.

    Most criminals preferentially victimize people in their community and frequently their own family members or friends, who are disproportionately of the same race.

    When you reduce policing and imprisonment you disproportionately benefit blacks who would otherwise be imprisoned or have negative police interactions at the expense of black crime victims.

    This is something that people who claim the American law enforcement and justice system are racist prefer to ignore.

    There is room around the edges for improvement - fine tuning who we imprison for how long and finding ways for policing to be better focused on criminals - but in general we have one dial ave any adjustment that reduces the negative impact of policing and imprisonment will increase the impact of crime and vice versa.

    Additionally, many of the best methods of reducing the negative impact of policing and imprisonment without increasing crime are likely to be objected to on civil liberties grounds. For example, civil liberties groups object to police use of facial recognition. How would you feel about police wearing AR glasses that link facial, gait, etc recognition to arrest and conviction records and show them hovering above every person the police interact with and shading dangerous people in red? What about AI predictions of likelihood of recidivism being used in sentencing and parole decisions? What about giving the police (and police AI systems) real time access to all of the door cameras and security cameras in a city to detect crimes in real time, to track perpetrators, and to identify fugitives? What about AI systems to identify likely future criminals to allow interventions to hell then and warnings that the police have an eye on them? I think some of these are OK and others are not acceptable, but all would work.

    1. jdubs

      Angry bigot announces on internet that we do in fact have two dials for police effectiveness, confirming the viewpoint he tries to dismiss. Then says he would prefer to pretend that we only have one dial so that he can continue to look down on the people he dismisses.

      Not the sharpest spoon

    2. jvoe

      This is not even remotely true. I guess you are trying to say that blacks disproportionately commit crime. When you correct for poverty level, this is also removes the differences by race. But we all know that you are here to be a racist troll so who cares what you think?

      1. nikos redux

        >>"When you correct for poverty level, this is also removes the differences by race. "

        Wish that were true, but it's actually not. Plenty of studies of crime have controlled for parental income in adolescence and the numbers barely budge.

    3. Justin

      MF - Mr. Drum and others will say that crime is not so bad that we need to put civil rights at risk so they will not support any of those things. They really don't have an answer to black on black crime. I'm not sure they really even care, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they just don't know what to do.

      We do need better police, but then who would want to be a police officer these days? No good deed goes unpunished.

      I despise criminals. Those who make excuses for them are not doing anyone any favors. There are lots of poor people who don't commit crimes. Dealing with the mentally ill in a way that respects their civil rights is just plain impossible.

      And then there are the drug users... From the NY Times a couple of days ago...

      "Young Black men in cities across America died of drug overdoses at high rates in the 1980s and 1990s. During the recent fentanyl crisis, older Black men in many cities have been dying at unusually high rates. They’re all from the same generation."

      See... it's not lead poisoning which caused the 80's crime wave as Mr. Drum suggests. It was narcotics.

      I have no sympathy for criminals. They make life miserable for everyone. Even those who are not victims. Democrats are simply wrong on so many aspects of the criminal justice problem that they really ought to just stop talking about it.

      I see Biden commuted the death sentences of most (but not all) in federal system. Genocide Joe suddenly feels bad about killing people... just not all of them. Hilarious. Since he thinks the other 3 deserve death, he should order their execution before 1/20. Own it. Jackass.

      1. Joel

        "Dealing with the mentally ill in a way that respects their civil rights is just plain impossible."

        And yet somehow all the Scandinavian countries do it, and rates of mental illness are no lower there.

    4. Citizen99

      This is not entirely wrong or racist. What's missing is income status. I doubt that a Black family that lives in an integrated higher-income community is more likely to be a victim of crime than their white or Asian neighbors. The problem with crime in majority-Black communities is primarily street gangs. Street gangs, in turn, are dependent on the illegal drug trade.

      So people who live where the illegal drug trade fuels gang activity are most likely to be the victims of violent crime, and those neighborhoods are also filled with low-income Americans.

      This is a problem that has been with us for centuries. The racial makeup of low-income, crime-ridden neighborhoods filled with street gangs have changed, but no one has yet come up with a solution. Maybe there just isn't one.

  5. cedichou

    the data that Switzerland is twice as safe as France seems very strange. The idea that France is closer to Venezuela than to Switzerland, a country that it shares a border with and that has similar population and a free flow of people in between the two countries? No.

  6. Chondrite23

    How much of this is due to wealth rather than race? If you are wealthy you tend to steal with a computer and contract language rather than with a knife or a gun.

    Makes me think of the movie Trading Places.

  7. sonofthereturnofaptidude

    These comparisons shed more heat then light, since violent crime statistics are gathered in so many different ways from country to country. These also exclude suicides, which in the US are the chief form of gun homicide; gun suicides outnumber other gun homicides by a little. Suicides are more frequent among whites, and leaving that out blurs the picture with respect to race. You could argue that attempted suicides are also a form of violent crime, which would change the stats even more.

    People who highlight black on black crime, by leaving out suicide, omit a huge part of the picture for whites, IMHO.

  8. Barry Galef

    A lot of the comments here appear to assume that the rankings are based on the official statistics from each country, and then speculate as to how cultural or institutional factors might cause intercountry differences. Kevin states, tho', that the numbers are based on surveys -- which would have their own problems but would avoid (say) distortions caused by greater willingness to report crimes to the authorities, or inefficiencies in data collection by police departments.

  9. tango

    I am not qualified to comment on exactly how correct these figures are. But it does point out something that I have seen in a number of charts and tables --- while overall the US does not do as well as similarly developed European countries on indicators like health, crime, education, etc, White Americans generally come out in the same league. It's only when you add African American stats in that we underperform.

    Not trying to slight our African American countrymen here or anything like that. Instead I view it as a kind of continued payback to the USA as a whole for the entire slavery/Jim Crow thing. Had we never gone that route, I suspect the USA would be a lot more like Europe than it is now.

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