Talk:List of cities by homicide rate

Legal literacy

The study linked is about homicide. Homicide is not murder. The legal definition of homicide is one person killing another. This can happen in accidents, in cases of self defense, in cases where police must shoot a criminal and many other events that don't count as murder by the law of a country. I don't know how to do it, but page should probably be changed to "List of cities by homicide rate". 216.58.122.145 (talk) 21:52, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

New york city

Is new york city on the list? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.217.70.184 (talk) 22:58, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

Mosul

What's Mosul, Iraq, doing on a list that claims to exclude the Middle East? Junuxx (talk) 10:37, 16 March 2014 (UTC)

delete this page

This page needs to be trashed. A cursory check of some of the data shows it to be flat wrong. The number of homicides in Chicago are half what the page reports. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.178.171.157 (talk) 15:57, 11 July 2015 (UTC)

Bizarre tag message

The validity of this list is questionable/misleading when no information is provided about the sample. A great deal more information about how this list was developed is necessary within the article.

Does the contributor who added this tag realize that information on murders isnn't generally obtained through surveys? Bataaf van Oranje (talk) 18:28, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

Cities in the world?

Only two are outside of the Americas, both in South Africa.

Nassau, Bahamas should be included:

http://www.cruiselawnews.com/2016/01/articles/caribbean-islands/more-per-capita-murder-than-detroit-nassau-continues-with-mayhem-in-2016/

http://www.thenassauguardian.com/news/63107-us-2015-was-most-deadly-year

http://www.barbadostoday.bb/2015/12/30/bahamas-stabbed-to-death-over-mayonnaise/

http://www.thenassauguardian.com/news/44468-bahamas-murder-rate-third-in-region

https://www.osac.gov/pages/ContentReportDetails.aspx?cid=17138 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Theannalsoftheworld (talk • contribs) 20:22, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

There's an important caveat at the beginning of the article: the list is of cities "not at war, with a population of at least 300,000 people, and all relevant data available online". Nassau's population is less than 300,000. -- Irn (talk) 20:56, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Safest Cities?

I was hoping to see which cities have the lowest homicide rate. Can someone find that? Paul, in Saudi (talk) 14:48, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

A single source, and it doesn't pass the smell test

This namespace is predicated entirely on a blog post at "WorldAtlas.com", which doesn't give any sources for their numbers whatsoever. This page should be made to cite verifiable statistics (e.g. UNODC, which I personally think is biased as hell, but at least verifiable for WP:RS purposes) or, failing that, nominated for deletion. 70.30.100.138 (talk) 03:49, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

Do not delete. It is very useful even if not fully RS.

Metropolitan versus City proper populations

A quick check of population sample sets proves this chart to be misleading. For example- the population of Caracas is given as the metropolitan number (city proper plus surrounding communities) while the population of Baltimore is given as city proper only and does not include surrounding communities. This greatly inflates the per capita rates for US cities as these metropolitan areas have significantly greater and safer communities outside their city proper than their Latin American counterparts. I have updated the Baltimore MD figure to show this tremendous difference. This now includes all metropolitan data including homicides in both the city proper and the surrounding 3-4 counties. 2601:14F:C200:96DF:0:0:0:6123 (talk) 12:39, 19 June 2017 (UTC)

That's a really interesting point, and I think it speaks to a potential weakness in the methodology - it's not clear what counts as a city, and it's not even consistent within countries. However, the changes you're making are original research, particularly synthesis. We can have a bigger discussion about how to address this, but changing the data in the list is not the way to go. -- Irn (talk) 02:47, 20 June 2017 (UTC)

I see that the data has been adjusted back to the original numbers- but this is not even an accurate reflection of the size of the cities listed- regardless of where the political boundaries are drawn. The fact is, it is clear what is a city and what is not a city. Rural areas are not included in cities. Contiguous urban areas are. Yes- cities do grow and shrink. Whoever has authored this list has purposely manipulated the data to affect an inaccurate portrayal of US cities- which would not even make the list with an apples to apples comparison. Caracas is a city of 2.9 million people just as Baltimore is a city of 2.7 million people. St. Louis is a city of 2.8 million. So absolutely no one should use this list as a meaningful ranking of homicide rates for metropolitan areas. If you want to compare principal municipalities- which would still be a meaningful comparison- Baltimore is a principal municipality of 620,000 just as Caracas is a principal municipality of 1.9 million. So either adjust the data or remove the page.173.64.118.133 (talk) 14:24, 20 June 2017 (UTC)

To echo some points already made: let me talk about two data points that I'm familiar with: Detroit, MI and Kingston, Jamaica. Detroit's population is listed here as 677,116, which only refers to the population of the actual political jurisdiction that is the city of Detroit (when you include its vast suburbs, the population of the entire metro area swells up to something like 4 million). And Kingston's population is somehow listed at about 1.2 million, even though Wikipedia itself puts the Kingston metro area population at just 662,000 (source: a). Where is this 1.2 million figure coming from? And of what value can this article possibly be when we aren't making apples-to-apples comparisons? 198.151.206.196 (talk) 16:54, 13 September 2017 (UTC)some_guy

References

Delete this page

We should delete this page. It's based on only two dubious sources and unifficial sources (worldatlas.com and seguridadyjusticia.org, and apparently, the first source is only replicating the info from the latter). Unless we provide official data from official sources, this article should be deleted. Odiseo79 (talk) 05:56, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

The decision to delete a page is made via the Articles for Deletion process, not on the article's talk page. You might want to take a moment to look that over, keeping in mind the notability requirements, specifically the requirements for stand-alone lists, and if you feel it's appropriate, you can nominate the article for deletion there. Cheers, -- irn (talk) 15:46, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

Puerto Rico - what is a "country"?

There are users who think Puerto Rico doesn't count as a country, specifically for the purpose of this page because of a political statement they want to make about how the president of the US is responsible for hurricanes.

Every other article that has listings of countries includes Puerto Rico as a country. Puerto Rico is not a sovereign nation, but it is a country, and whether or not that means it should be accounted on this list *and other lists like it* is something that should applied consistently across Wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.130.173.243 (talk) 06:40, 26 July 2018 (UTC)

Puerto Rico is very explicitly an unincorporated US territory, and in no way a country. If you look at say List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate, the column is "Country (or dependent territory, subnational area, etc.)", and in the raw UNODC data, it's titled "Country/territory". The article should either have the column name changed, or incorporate San Juan into the United States. -Kieran (talk) 19:39, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

To follow up, I've taken the simpler approach of leaving all the wording as "by country" and setting the country for San Juan to the USA. -Kieran (talk) 19:45, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

The table does not include Puerto Rico's flag only but an expandable tab, is this intentional? Marathonian (talk) 18:18, 29 December 2018 (UTC)

The fact that Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory of the U.S. rather than an incorporated territory makes it appropriate to list it as a "country". It is not an independent state like Switzerland or China, but that is not always what "country" means. An incorporated territory of the U.S. is within the boundaries of the U.S., as Alaska and Hawaii were before their admissions to the Union as separate states or as the Northwest territory was from 1787 until 1803 (in 1803 the eastern part of that territory became the state of Ohio and the rest remained an organized incorporated territory). An unincorporated territory is a country outside the boundaries of the U.S. but under U.S. jurisdiction, as Puerto Rico has been since the conclusion of the war of 1898 against Spain. Michael Hardy (talk) 22:26, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

It's a pretty old discussion now, but for what it's worth, the definitive 1902 US Supreme Court ruling is fairly clear. "In the case of De Lima v. Bidwell, just decided, we held that, upon the ratification of the treaty of peace with Spain, Porto Rico ceased to be a foreign country, and became a territory". "The result of what has been said is that, while in an international sense Porto Rico was not a foreign country, since it was subject to the sovereignty of and was owned by the United States, it was foreign to the United States in a domestic sense". Since Wikipedia is an international encyclopaedia, it seems most appropriate to use the international sense. -Kieran (talk) 22:33, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

Wrong counting on number of cities by countries

It shows islamabad as number2. But in the section by country. It does not show pakistan with one city. And instead venezuela has 5 cities..it should be only 4. Tha nks Nelsongonzalez2019 (talk) 18:42, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

The page had been vandalized. (Islamabad does not appear on the list.) Thanks for pointing this out! -- irn (talk) 21:21, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Time to update?

There is a new study with up to date info: http://seguridadjusticiaypaz.org.mx/files/estudio.pdf 2804:14D:5C54:8988:807F:1D2E:30B0:C186 (talk) 00:08, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

The pdf seems to only list the top 10 and doesn't provide any sources. Potadao (talk) 11:20, 12 September 2019 (UTC)