Baltimore's Homicide Rate Is Ten Times Larger than the US Rate08/02/2019Ryan McMaken
Donald Trump in recent days has repeatedly attacked the city of Baltimore for its very low quality of life, denouncing it as "rodent-infested" and noting it has a very, very high homicide rate.
It's difficult to find reliable stats on Baltimore's rodent population per capita, but we can consult the FBI crime data on Baltimore's homicide rate. When it comes to Baltimore being a haven of appalling violent crime, Trump's not wrong.
The most recent homicide data from the FBI (2017) shows the city of Baltimore with a homicide rate of 55.8 per 100,000 population.That's a homicide rate comparable to El Salvador (60 per 100,000) and Venezuela (56 per 100,000). Baltimore has more homicides per capita than Honduras, Guatemala, South Africa, and Brazil.
In other words, Baltimore's homicide problem is worse than those in many of the world's most violent countries.
In contrast, the US homicide rate in 2017 was 5.3 per 100,000 making Baltimore homicide rate ten times larger than that in the US overall.
Moreover, the gap between the US homicide rate and the Baltimore homicide rate has gotten worse over the past decade. The US rate has fallen since 2007, but it has gone up significantly in Baltimore over that time.
This gap also helps to illustrate the absurdity of referring to a "America's homicide problem," when the overwhelming majority of Americans live in places with homicide rates that are a small fraction of the places known for frequent killings.
For examples, if we look at homicide rate in metropolitan Baltimore, but remove homicides from the core city, we find the homicide rate was 3.5 per 100,000 in 2017. That makes metro Baltimore — excluding the core city — one of the safest places in the Western hemisphere, similar to that of Manitoba or Saskatchewan in Canada.
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https://mises.org/wire/baltimores-homic ... er-us-rate 
