The main point is that London has a homicide rate of around 2.1 per 100,000 population, whereas Washington DC, Philadelphia, Dallas, Los Angeles and New York have (comparatively) high rates - 69.3, 27.4, 24.8 and 22.8 respectively.
I haven’t started this to get into some jingoistic debate about the rights and wrongs of gun control, or an international skirmish on America-bashing. I think those debates are a dead end, and have been inconclusively argued off and on for years.
I’m genuinely curious as to why Washington DC, and to a lesser extent Philadelphia, Dallas, Los Angeles and New York, have such a high murder rate per 100,000 compared to cities such as London, Rome or Athens.
Do the figures surprise any SDMB residents of those cities? Are there particularly unique circumstances in any of those cities? Are the police forces perceived as ineffective or especially constrained in their operations? Regardless of the rights and wrongs of gun control, is it related to gun availability?
Although I think the availability of guns is largely responsible for the difference in murder rates, here’s something that could well be a contributing factor:
Cities like London, Paris, Berlin, etc. have powerful organized crime overlords who monopolize most of the high profit crime. That kind of monopoly is a stablizing influence in the distribution of drugs and weapons and gang rivalrys.
Thanks to good old fashioned American free enterprise and competition (with a little help from the FBI and RICO laws) we really don’t have those kinds of crime monopolies anymore. Say what you will about the Mafia, at least they kept a lid on a lot of the violence inherrent in the crime biz. If you wanted to wack or doublecross a connected crook, you had better have had permission from the big boys.
Well, a lot of the big boys aren’t around anymore, and Joe Punk doesn’t need to answer to anybody but the law if he gets the itch to off someone. A good analogy is the Balkins. All the ethnic factions were kept in line under Tito. When he died, all hell broke loose. Same thing with American crime. The Mafia kept a tight leash on things. When their influence faded away, so did all the rules.
beatle, the topic title was a bored mid-afternoon attempt at a pun. Not one of my better ones, admittedly…
…and I have no idea why the thread appeared twice - I only posted it once. Strange things are afoot at the SDMB, apparently.
Just my thoughts, but I certainly <i>feel</i> safer in the US from the point of view of potentially being mugged/battered/burgled. They do seem less prevalent. I don’t worry about being killed that often, I suppose i’d think differently if I was young, poor, black or whatever are the characteristics of the usual (eg gang-related) murder victims.
The OP had specifically to do with the murder rate, not crime in general. I’d say the difference had to do with:
Gun access policy and enforcement.
Demography (to use the all-encompassing, safe and sterile term).
The relative recency/antiquity of an independent frontier culture.
Degree of political socialization.
Motility of corporate wage sources.
Differences in anti-drug policies.
It’s the interaction of several of the above that does it. The per-capita murder rate can be very high in small cities or even rundown suburbs in the US. Oakland and Richmond, in the San Francisco Bay Area maintain high murder rates. Until a few years back, the small, then unincorporated town of East Palo Alto (next to, but conveniently across the county line from Palo Alto) had an even higher murder rate.
Oakland can’t seem to win. Granny Goose Potato Chips just announced the loss of 170 jobs there (mostly blue-collar), as a result of its move to Utah, after having been rekindled in 1995 by a loan from that city. Few businesses or government entities work right in that city, but it does retain a great deal of residential wealth in its hills area.