Home - Conflict Mortality Surveys|Bias Paper|Follow-up Paper|Visual Summary|FAQs|L1 versus L2|Methods
Urban Homicide Rates Around the World|Iraq Maps|Control and Danger|News|Clarifications|Presentations|About Us|Contact Us
Urban Homicide Rates Around the World
Below we provide links to literature showing how dramatically urban violence varies from neighborhood to neighborhood in a wide variety of cities. Iraqi cities are likely to follow this pattern. Therefore, any sampling scheme for measuring Iraq violence that cannot reach many neighborhoods is vulnerable to distortion.
If the authors of The Lancet paper share their data it might be possible to get a firmer grip on the biases of their sampling scheme. For example, it would be helpful to analyze the relationship between the characteristics of the neighborhoods where they sampled and mortality rates that they measured there. Of course, the burden must be on the authors to show that their study does not have significant biases. This is a difficult task in a violence study because, as demonstrated below, there is huge variation by location in urban violence rates in cities worldwide. It is far from trivial to draw a representative sample.
Homicide Rate in
New York City (Columbia University,
Mailman School of Public Health, Press Room)
Here is a map of homicide rates by neighborhood in New York City. There is extreme variation with neighborhoods that had no homicides in 2002 frequently surrounding exceptionally dangerous areas by any standard with homicide rates exceeding 0.4 per 1000.
Homicide Rate in Washington Heights
and Inwood (Columbia University,
Mailman School of Public Health, Press Room)
Even when we zoom in on one particular neighborhood of New York we still find dramatic variation in homicide rates.
Relocation of
Public
Housing Residents and High Homicide Areas (Hagedorn, J. and Rauch, B.)
A map of homicide rates by district in Chicago. It gives fairly broad ranges so you can't calculate accurately but there can be huge variation even between neighboring districts, e.g., more than a factor of 50 on several occasions.
Homicide Rate in Bogotá, Colombia
(Katherine
Aguirre and Jorge Restrepo with the assistance of Simón Mesa and
Nicholás Suárez)
Moving to Bogotá, Colombia, another war-torn country, the data is not as fine-grained as in our previous pictures but is still sufficient to show big variation by area.
Violencia homicida y estructuas criminales in Bogotá
(Maria Victoria Llorente, Rodolfo Escobedo, Camilo Echandia and Maricio Rubio)
In 'Seguridad Ciudadana: ¿espejismo o realidad?' Ed.: Fernando Carrión
This picture gives slightly older but more disaggregated data for Bogotá and shows a very similar pattern to what we have already seen for Chicago and New York.
The urban environment from the health perspective: the case of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil
(Cad. Saúde Pública vol.21 no.3 Rio de
Janeiro May/June 2005)
"In Greater Metropolitan Belo Horizonte, these rates have also been increasing, with major intra-urban differences, especially in areas with worse living conditions 7. In the central-southern area of the city, the risk of death by homicide was 16 times greater in the slum areas than in the urbanized neighborhoods from the same area 8."
"The 2,801 accumulated homicide cases generated a mean annual rate of 25.01 per 100 thousand inhabitants, varying according to the planning units, from 0 to 186 per 100 thousand inhabitants. The PMR varied from 0 to 9.27 indicating that in 18 (22.5%) of the 80 planning units, the homicide rates were 1.5 to 9.3 times higher than in the city as a whole, with particular emphasis on three planning units represented by slum complexes located in the downtown area of the city."
There's also a map that looks similar to the Chicago one in having quite bad areas right next to quite good areas (The map is showing a composite of five things of which homicide is only 1 but the main point of the paper is that the five move together.)
Infant and Youth Survival Indicators Disaggregated By District Income
( Mattew Hanley, José Augusto de A. C. Taddei, James Setzer, Ana Paula Poblacion Fonseca )
"Childhood Mortality Rates in the poorest districts of São Paulo were between 3 and 13 times grater than in the wealthiest district. Mortality Rates due to External Causes in the poorest districts were between 6 and 24 times higher than in the wealthiest districts."
Social inequality and homicide rates in Sao Paulo City, Brazil
(Vilma Pinheiro Gawryszewski; Luciana Scarlazzari Costa)
Analysis of the distribution of homicide rates indicates that the lowest value (3.6/100,000, in the Jardim Paulista district) was 28 times smaller that the highest value (106.3/100,000, in the district of Parelheiros). These rates were classified in four groups: 1) up to 24.9/100,000: low risk (there were 23 districts in this group, that represents 17% of the overall population); 2) from 25 to 49.9/100,000: medium risk (there were 37 districts in this category, representing 29.6% of the total population); 3) from 50 to 74.9/100,000: high risk (22 districts, representing 30.7% of the total population); 4) 75.0/100,000 and more: very high risk (14 districts, representing 22.4% of the total population). The districts with the lowest homicide rates were those characterized by the most favorable living conditions, most of which are located in western region of the city. The districts that displayed the highest homicide rates were located in central and peripheral zones of the city.
Patterns of violence in Karachi, Pakistan (H A Chotani, J A Razzak and S P Luby)
Violence occurred in certain areas of Karachi disproportionately. These areas were not in close proximity to each other and were neither unusually poor nor wealthy communities. The ambulance service was not concentrated in these areas; neither were the population in these areas large enough to explain the greater number of homicides. For example, the 1998 census of Karachi showed that Korangi, which accounted for 22% of all homicides, contained 6% of the total city population, while Malir accounted for 8% of homicides and contained only 4.5% of the population. In contrast, the other two areas with high numbers of homicides, Nazimabad and Orangi, each with 8%, had an equal percentage of population (15.5%). One common characteristic among these four areas is that they were all were strongholds of Karachi’s major opposition party. Here we see that politics can explain big variations in violence. Of course, this is almost surely the case in Iraq. Did the researchers sample disproportionately from units with particular political affiliations?
Hot Spots of Predatory Crime: Routine Activities and The CrimInology of Place
(LAWRENCE W. SHERMAN, PATRICK R. GARTIN, MICHAEL E. BUERGER)
A leading sociological theory of crime is the "routine activities" approach (Cohen and Felson, 1979). The premise of this ecological theory is that criminal events result from likely offenders, suitable targets, and the absence of capable guardians against crime converging nonrandomly in time and space. Yet prior research has been unable to employ spatial data, relying instead on individual- and household-level data, to test that basic premise. This analysis supports the premise with spatial data on 323,979 calls to police over all 115,000 addresses and intersections in Minneapolis over 1 year. Relatively few "hot spots" produce most calls to Police (50% of calls in 3% of places) and calls reporting predatory crimes (all robberies at 2.2% of places, all rapes at 1.2% of places, and all auto thefts at 2.7% of places), because crime is both rare (only 3.6% of the city could have had a robbery with no repeat addresses) and concentrated, although the magnitude of concentration varies by offense type. These distributions all deviate significantly, and with ample magnitude, from the simple Poisson model of chance, which raises basic questions about the criminogenic nature of places, as distinct from neighborhoods or collectivities.