Talk:List of metropolitan areas by intentional homicide

I hope this is a work in progress, because at this time this article makes no sense at all. Apparently they are mixing the total number of homicides in a city per year (an interesting but not very useful statistic) with the number of homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, (a normalized measure). For comparisons only the latter is valid. 132.192.14.232 22:10, 8 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes I mucked up, my bad. :/ Still getting used to this site.


 * My argument is that totals do matter because a larger city will often have more violent quarters than a smaller one but a lower homicide rate overall. A happy medium if you will. I done a totals equivalent of this page (look it up if you haven't already), copied and pasted it here while reworking it into rates. Sarcastic Sid 18:36, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Something important to note guys, some of these values are incorrect, the values of new york from 2001 onwards are way off. I corrected them but I am just pointing out there is a possibility of many of these other ones being incorrect —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.183.223.10 (talk) 02:10, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

How on earth did you miss the headline of the list?? LOL that's pretty funny but seriously, feel free to read the links or add to the article accordingly. Many thanks. Power Society (talk) 02:24, 8 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Well I guess something to point out then, in the case of New York City, the values for CIUS uses only the New York part of the Metro area while the table format from 2004 onwards uses the New York and New Jersey areas. To be more accurate for the years using the CIUS method, one would have to add up the New York and New Jersey areas of the Metropolitan area used in the newer format. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.183.223.10 (talk) 20:33, 8 July 2010 (UTC)

There was a large change in the FBI's definition of metro NYC in the early 00's which swallowed Newark (which was it's own metropolitan area with surrounding suburbs) amongst others. If you look closely, New York previous to that had a very small suburban area - about half a million outside city limits.

Even if the situation arises I don't want to start adding stuff together/calculating rates which aren't available for a metro and putting it in otherwise people will think they can put anything on the list, we should stick to what the data says in the sources. I used to do this but now I believe it's against Wiki policy when quoting statistics which should correspond with the source. Power Society (talk) 08:49, 10 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Yea it would be a bit of a pain, then may I just suggest some sort of indicator that shows that there was an expansion in their definition of it's metro area. In it's current form, it can be misleading by making people think there was a large increase in the homicides in the metro area. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.183.223.10 (talk) 18:44, 10 July 2010 (UTC)

Is the description correct?
Hi, Sarcastic Sid. First, please allow me to congratulate you for all your work compiling these statistics. I know that it's extremely laborious to accumulate all the documentation and to condense it in a single table for comparison, especially when the terms involved are not really standardized. For example, which urban regions are considered as the same metropolitan region, the unavailability of reliable census information, and which deaths are considered intentional homicide (as you pointed out in the Totals article, sometimes even legal intervention killings are included in the statistics). This is hard work and we should thank you for doing it. So please take the following opinions only as constructive criticism.

The description of this article says that it is based on "All homicides for the 50 worst affected zones with 100,000 or more inhabitants." Thus, you would expect that no other metro area with over 100,000 inhabitants would have a higher rate than the last one in the list. OK, here are my problems:
 * It is extremely suspicious that all 50 metropolitan regions are concentrated in only six countries.
 * Only four of these countries are among the six countries with highest homicide rate. (BTW, thanks for contributing to that page also, and please note that even that list is evidently incomplete: for example, Guyana is not in the list for the 2000's although it has three times higher rate than the USA.)
 * Several of the countries in that list have much higher homicide rates per 100,000 inhabitants than many of the cities in this list! That would only be possible if the population in all those countries is concentrated mainly in rural areas and towns with less than 100,000 inhabitants (quite the contrary in many of those cases) and most of the homicides were occurring out of the medium and large cities (again, not the case in most of those countries).
 * I know you got the statistics for the USA from a very authoritative source (the FBI). But I find it strange that they don't match at all with the ones from Morgan Quitno Press summarized (for 2005) here. (BTW, since you are clearly taking this very seriously you may want to buy the report offered in the M.Q.P. homepage). Is this due to the distinction between "city" and "metropolitan area"? Or the deaths considered "murders"? Or incomplete reporting from local authorities to the FBI?
 * Your numbers for the USA seem also to clash with the ones in this page, which claim to come from the FBI (although infoplease.com is not really an authoritative source).

In any case, I guess that my issue is mainly with the description (and maybe the title) of the article, not with the data itself. If this is a work in progress, that is, as you study more countries you are "bumping off" metropolitan areas from the list to open space for the newly-found ones, the solution may be to temporarily change the description to avoid misinforming a casual observer. Thanks again. 132.192.14.232 02:50, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Hello again 132.192.14.232 and thanks for your contribution. I did actually see your latest comments on the day you wrote them but it was a lot to take in and I needed a break from the site. I'm just gonna read through them a few more times so I can fully understand and give an informed opinion as your grammar is excellent and you're clearly some kind of brain. Sarcastic Sid 02:19, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

Back again. Have you got any statistics for Central American cities? The info's a lot sketchier and harder to get hold of than the South American equivalent though I have found a figure for Guatemala City which (I think) is the metro region. I've also found some rates for Kingston in Jamaica, which in my experience were staggeringly hard to get hold of considering it's an English-speaking nation and has close relations with Britain. It appears to be for the metro as well which is pleasing.

As far as certain countries having much higher homicide rates than cities on this list, C.American cities would be appreciated though I've hardly got anything on them as I've stated, and the very high homicide rates for Swaziland are a bit dubious and include other forms of death apparently. At least that's what I've heard..though it's a highly rural/small town nation anyhow.

I'd prefer including legal intervention homicides but there is inconsistency in what countries include them in their data and/or for individual cities. The FBI has them at national level but not for cities as far as I know. Colombia already includes them so when I know they're seperate for some city in another country and they're available, I'll add them on like I've done with Caracas. I would exclude Colombia's but I don't know how many legal homicides are in each city. It would be interesting having two seperate lists, one with murders and the other with lawful killings.

I haven't looked into your American figures yet but it's interesting what you're saying about the differences between the FBI and Morgan Quitno Press.

Finally I've added a number of Colombian cities which I know are the metro region as the Colombian National Police always include the surrounding suburbs. Other Colombian organizations such as the National Administrative Department of Statistics or Medicina Legal are more mixed on whether they use numbers for the city or metro. Several of the cities featured in that rubbish Medellin page and have unsurprisingly far lower homicide rates for the same year (2005). Sarcastic Sid 10:23, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Suspicious source
Me again! I found the homicide rates for the first few cities to be amazingly high, so I decided to take a look at the numbers. I noticed that you took the data for the first four cities (Tuluá, Buga, Palmira, Villavicencio) from this slideshow, a document from the mayor's office of Medellín, Antioquia Department (Colombia). Please notice that the relevant slide also includes extremely high rates for Bucaramanga and Pereira, which you didn't include in the table, and that the numbers don't really match what you have for Cali and, to a lesser extent, Bogotá and Medellín. I guess that you didn't include Bucaramanga and Pereira because you found conflicting information which you didn't find for the other four cities. Well, here is your conflicting information:

On the second page of this document from Colombia's Presidential Program for Human Rights, you will find the number of homicides for 2006 for several municipalities of the Valle del Cauca department, which includes three of the four cities in question. Paired with data from the 2005 census, you get these results: Please note: My point is not that you should take my data (although you might want to use the new reference), but rather to point out that the Medellín slide doesn't seem to be very reliable. And after all this I really appreciate all the effort you have done putting everything together!! Cheers! 132.192.14.232 05:36, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
 * There's an evident typo in the number of homicides for Cartago in the PDF I linked above.
 * Buga is conspicuously missing from the PDF, suggesting that the number of homicides is less than Cartago.
 * The rates for Cali are interestingly higher than the numbers you have.
 * All the cities except Cali and Buga have much lower rates than the ones cited in the Medellín's mayor slideshow. These numbers are pretty much in line with the historical numbers you have for the early 2000's, except for the sharp changes in Buenaventura and Cartago.

Yep, you're quite right that the Medellin slideshow is VERY dodgy. It never looked right at all, and several cities appeared to have what seemed more like total homicides attributed to them rather than rates. I left it there because it was from a normally reliable source and I was convinced I'd find something better for that year and those cities.

That Valle del Cauca info you provided, I have the web page in one of my folders but the obvious mistake for Cartago made me reticent about using it. Then again I used the Medellin one. :/ I'll remove the figures from the Medellin slide which I've never been happy with.

Bucaramanga and Pereira have a surrounding suburban ring apparently and I wasn't sure if they were talking about the agglomeration or the official city. I may comment more on this discussion but thanks for now. Sarcastic Sid 03:01, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

Work in progress
I'm just working on a 90's table I'll finish it later. Thanks. Sarcastic Sid 13:12, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Updating homicide lists to 100
Lists of 100 would be appropriate.

Sarcastic Sid 09:42, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

What about San Salvador (El Salvador) ?
You can have a look e.g. to http://www.ocavi.com/docs_files/file_703.pdf

There the dept. of San Salvador (with 2.250.000 million people) is meant. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.200.225.99 (talk) 16:50, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

I see where you're coming from and I even had San Salvador department on here thinking it was the metropolitan area. After looking into it further I discovered the San Salvador metropolitan area doesn't take up the whole department and also overflows into neighbouring La Libertad. Guatemala department was in the list a while back too with me thinking it was the metropolitan area of Guatemala City. Like San Salvador it doesn't take up the entire division and sprawls over the border into at least one other department. Power Society (talk) 21:33, 11 October 2009 (UTC)