Slashdot Mirror
Interactive Map Exposes the World's Most Murderous Places
Lashdots writes with this selection from a Fast Company story: In 2012, 437,000 people were killed worldwide, yielding a global average murder rate of 6.2 per 100,000 inhabitants. A third of those homicides occurred in Latin America and the Caribbean, home to just 8% of the world's population. But data on violent death can be difficult to obtain, since governments are often reluctant to share their homicide statistics. What data is available is sometimes inconsistent and inconclusive.
Adds Lashdots: To make this data clear and to better address the problem of global homicide, a new open-source visualization tool, the Homicide Monitor, tracks the total number of murders and murder rates per country, broken down by gender, age and, where the data is available, the type of weapon used, including firearms, sharp weapons, blunt weapons, poisoning, and others. For the most violent region in the world, the 40 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, you can also see statistics by state and city. That geographic specificity helps to underscore an important point about murders, says Robert Muggah, the research director and program coordinator for Citizen Security at the Rio de Janeiro-based Igarapé Institute, in the above-lined story: "In most cities, the vast majority of violence takes place on just a few street corners, at certain times of the day, and among specific people."
There are already laws that govern police behavior. Just because the police may break those laws does not mean we need more laws. And companies also have a whole list of laws and regulations they must adhere to and just because a company may break those laws doesn't mean more laws are needed. And everyone should have equal opportunities but there are some who willfully fail to take advantage of those opportunities. No matter what reforms are handed down by the national or local governments the ultimate responsibility is on the individual and trying to shift the responsibility on to someone else will not help anything.