Before Harvey hit, Houston had a murder rate of about 13 per 100,000 residents. That’s nowhere near as low as New York, with its own murder rate at fewer than four equivalent homicides, but it’s much better than New Orleans, with its homicide rate in 2004, the year before Katrina, of 59 murders per 100,000 people (and 45 today). Houston has also seen its population soar, from 1.6 million in 1980 to 2.3 million today. New Orleans, before Katrina, was shrinking, from 558,000 in 1980 to 455,000 in 2005: thriving municipalities have more civic unity and the necessary service infrastructure to respond to crisis than do cities in decline.I see in an article from the Economist earlier this year there was this graphic:
And in Australia, we struggle to make it to 1.5 per 100,000 in a year, for murder and manslaughter combined.
It's not as clear or as easy as you think. The US is a huge country with a racially diverse population.
ReplyDeleteYou need to go deep racially homogeneous areas in the US and then compare them to the crime rate in European home country.
Comparing Austria to the US is pretty useless. IT would be better to compare the crime rate where the Germanic population resides. Some of the Midwest states would be a good fit. Even states like Dakota has a large population of Germanic origin.
Who is this, talking about Germanic population in the US? Sounds vaguely neo-Nazi endorsing :)
ReplyDeleteYes, the US has wildly varying local murder rates - in one of those links it noted how New York had a dramatically lower rate now than neighbouring New Jersey.
I wasn't particularly trying to make any point, I was just noting that Houston - a city the libertarian Right thinks is cool because it has had good growth and low regulation has a few deficiencies compared to Liberal heart land New York - such as many more murders and letting people build their affordable houses and apartments on flood plains, where presumably they will not be able to get insurance in future.