MURDER RATES, THEIRS AND OURS

Wingnuts often make absurd claims like "Philadelphia is more dangerous than Baghdad" so I thought I'd look up some hard numbers about murders in both Iraq and the U.S.

The FBI has final statistics for the year 2005 and here's the summary for murder:

An estimated 16,692 persons were murdered nationwide in 2005.
There were an estimated 5.6 murders per 100,000 inhabitants.

Reliable Iraqi statistics are harder to come by so I went to a few sources.

Iraq Body Count reports that 14,089 civilians were killed in 2005.

The Iraq Coalition Casulty Count reports 5,680 but has no figures for January and February.

The Manchester Guardian notes that the Iraq Ministry of Health reported 7, 254 murders in 2005.

The Brookings Institution estimates that between 5,696 and 9,934 civilians were killed in Iraq during all of 2005. The midpoint is 7,815.

Although there is no breakdown by year, in October, 2006, a team of epimediologists found that there were about 600,000 excess violent civilian deaths. That translates into about 500 violent deaths per day or 182,500 per year.

The United Nations estimated that there were over 34,000 violent civilian deaths in 2006, a figure that is much higher than the comparable figures given by the Associated Press which in turn was derived from Iraq ministry figures.

These last two reports indicate that even the high estimate by Iraq Body Count may be under the true count but there is no way to be sure. Here I will assume that the IBC's number is correct.

The CIA gives a July 2006 estimate of Iraq's population as 26,783,383. Here I will use 26 million as the population for 2005.

The result is that Iraq's had 54.2 violent civilian deaths per 100,000 in 2005, almost 10 times the rate for the entire U.S. According to the FBI's statistics, the Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn area had the second highest rate* for metropolitan areas in 2005: 19.5.


*the highest was 19.6 in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.