Why do many New World cities/countries have higher murder rates than Old World?

[Capsicum]

Even ones comparatively not poorer than the Old World places (such as Africa and Asia) most similar to them in density, climate and even demographics.









Is this high inequality, the drug trade, the legacy of conquest of the natives, slavery and settler colonialism disadvantaging the native/indigenous and black/Afro-descendants, so much so that even places in Africa, Mid-east and Asia that are equally or even much poorer still have lower murder/crime rates than the New World's most dangerous cities?

Not counting war, since areas in the Mid-east and parts of Africa would rank high in dangerous conflict in that regard.

[xzmattzx]

The illegal drug trade

[Crawford]

Inequality, weapons proliferation and legacy of slavery.

[Centropolis]

Originally Posted by xzmattzx

The illegal drug trade

but i mean barcelona doesnt have spates of 10 murders in a day (that i know of).

i hear global news of stabbing attacks on european metros where nobody even dies but 10 people get not only shot but murdered and the news doesnt even leave its own media market.

[PFloyd]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Inequality, weapons proliferation and legacy of slavery.

You are talking about the US, right?

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by PFloyd

You are talking about the US, right?

Um, yeah. Last I checked the New World included the U.S., and the factors I mentioned are common to almost of all of the New World.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by PFloyd

You are talking about the US, right?

Pretty much all of the Americas except Canada.

[niwell]

You can come up with some common themes, but at the end of the day each of these countries has it's own unique set of circumstances that led them to the current situation. Inequality is likely at the centre of the Venn Diagram, but inequality alone doesn't account for everything. For instance, despite having similar murder rates, the crime patterns in South Africa and Brazil are quite different.

As an aside, while murders are the most easily recorded indicators of high crime, they aren't always the best way of measuring crime one may actually experience. In South Africa they record "contact crimes" which essentially means something that involves violence but would include things like being robbed at gunpoint, getting carjacked or home invasions. Contact crime rates have generally gone down year over year despite a slight increase in the murder rate, which is disproportionately affected by gang warfare in the Cape Flats area of Cape Town. It's still not a perfect measure, as some extremely violent Townships record relatively low contact crime rates compared to CBD areas and suburbs. The reality is people in these areas aren't reporting crimes, whereas even petty crime is reported in affluent areas (even if only for insurance claims) and CCTV captures everything in CBDs.

I would suspect that these types of crimes - while still too high - are much lower in high murder American cities than places like South Africa or Brazil.

[Handro]

It doesn't seem a coincidence that the New World countries with highest murder rates are also the ones most victimized by Old World colonization, almost to a T.

[Obadno]

Originally Posted by Capsicum

Is this high inequality, the drug trade, the legacy of conquest of the natives, slavery and settler colonialism disadvantaging the native/indigenous and black/Afro-descendants, so much so that even places in Africa, Mid-east and Asia that are equally or even much poorer still have lower murder/crime rates than the New World's most dangerous cities?

Not counting war, since areas in the Mid-east and parts of Africa would rank high in dangerous conflict in that regard.

It has more to do with culture and poverty than anything. Even in the United states almost all of the murders happen in poor urban primarily black neighborhood in a handful of cities.

And even for as much focus as murder in places like Chicago and Baltimore get it is nothing compared to how much murder and crime there was in the 70's and 80's

[Obadno]

Originally Posted by Handro

It doesn't seem a coincidence that the New World countries with highest murder rates are also the ones most victimized by Old World colonization, almost to a T.

For some reason nobody gets angry at Spain and Portugal despite them being the perpetrators of almost all colonial atrocities and most of the slave trade

[jtown,man]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Inequality, weapons proliferation and legacy of slavery.

Why doesn't the "legacy of slavery" impact people in Asia, Europe, or Africa? All those places had slavery until modern times.

[hallelujah]

History of slavery and colonialism and the CIA

[hallelujah]

Originally Posted by jtown,man

Why doesn't the "legacy of slavery" impact people in Asia, Europe, or Africa? All those places had slavery until modern times.

Not nearly at the scale of the Americas.

[hallelujah]

Originally Posted by Obadno

For some reason nobody gets angry at Spain and Portugal despite them being the perpetrators of almost all colonial atrocities and most of the slave trade

Maybe because they're a shell of their former selves with no real power.

[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by Obadno

For some reason nobody gets angry at Spain and Portugal despite them being the perpetrators of almost all colonial atrocities and most of the slave trade

Spain and Portugal were some of the most brutal colonizers out there, but they're also farther removed than the others. They were doing their raping & pillaging back in the 1500 and 1600s, and were otherwise mostly gone from the continent by the 1800s.

I'm not sure their legacy really has much of an effect on contemporary murder rates in Latin America. Especially when we consider that for most of the 1800s and early 1900s most of these were prosperous, immigrant-attracting colonial settler nations on par with Canada or the US.

While poverty, inequality, corruption, and the proliferation of guns are big factors in the high murder rates of American countries, I think the bigger cause is that much of the global drug trade is centred on this part of the world. A country like Mexico is actually quite prosperous and reasonably successful by global standards - the cause of its crime problem relative to other middle-income nations is owed entirely to the drug trade and the massive cartels that have been empowered by it.

[MonkeyRonin]

Originally Posted by jtown,man

Why doesn't the "legacy of slavery" impact people in Asia, Europe, or Africa? All those places had slavery until modern times.

Every part of the world had slavery, but the slave societies that existed in the Americas are unique in that their economies were built around slave labour, and as such, imported millions of people for the sole purpose of slavery - people who's status was then further reinforced by race-based discrimination.

The legacy of that is that these former slave societies now have significant underclass populations.

[badrunner]

When guns outnumber people, you're going to have a lot of murders. It's just common sense. If you flood Japan with 150 million guns in private hands I can guarantee you the murder rate will skyrocket overnight. It's not that complicated.

[sopas ej]

Originally Posted by badrunner

When guns outnumber people, you're going to have a lot of murders. It's just common sense. If you flood Japan with 150 million guns in private hands I can guarantee you the murder rate will skyrocket overnight. It's not that complicated.

Culture has a lot to do with that too, so, I don't see Japan's murder rate necessarily going up if you flood their population with millions of guns. People in Tokyo leave their bicycles unlocked on the sidewalks all the time without any worry that they'll get stolen.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by badrunner

When guns outnumber people, you're going to have a lot of murders. It's just common sense. If you flood Japan with 150 million guns in private hands I can guarantee you the murder rate will skyrocket overnight. It's not that complicated.

This is a good point, too. The U.S., Mexico, and Guatemala are the only countries in the world that enshrine the right to own a gun in their constitutions. Countries in the Americas in general have a more lax approach to gun control than just about everywhere else in the world.