Assault Deaths within the United States

This is fascinating, if tremendously sad. Thank you for putting it together.

The starkness of the South is pretty remarkable. I was going to speculate that it had something to do with being less urbanized, but I stopped to check and was reminded that 3 of the top 10 largest cities (Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston) are in the South.

One question on the last chart — does the CDC not break out by ethnicity as well as race? There are no figures for Hispanic/Latino on the chart.

Yes, The % urban of the 4 census regions in 2010 are as follows:
West 89.8
Northeast 85.0.
Midwest 75.9
South 75.8

The percentage for the South is strongly influenced by Florida (> 91%) and Texas (> 84%). All the other states there are below the national average.

In terms of murder rates, the US South (and Maryland) is comparable to late sixteenth/early seventeenth century Western Europe, which was roughly 10/100,000 with minor geographical variations.

Re 1 and Hispanics: Yes, the CDC put the homicide rate for Hispanics at 7.2. See my link at #52 of Kieran’s last post. Kieran’s link above analyzes the data slightly differently and would likely yield somewhat different numbers, but the tool does allow searching by Hispanic origin.

I’m not sure the breakout by state really adds much that’s meaningful, since the variance is pretty much a proxy for race, where the differences are so wide as to overwhelm any other distinctions.

Martin@2: for homicides, Wikipedia has a breakdown by states/provinces for Canada, Australia, United States and Mexico. The last is of interest because it is part of the OECD, but its homicide toll (15 per 100,000) is far higher than the US (with Chihuahua at 111 per 100,000!) However, I would guess that the major factor is inter-Cartel violence.

Witt@1: less urbanisation may be a factor. The highest for Oz is the Northern Territory, and the highest for Canada is Nunavut – 18 per 100,000. Both are sparsely inhabited territories. But even the NT at its worse is less that many US States, and almost all of the Mexican ones.

(I have no idea why Nunavut is so high. But its population at 31,906 is so low that it probably more susceptible to statistical fluctuations.)

These are some extremely striking numbers. Thank you for posting them.

The one positive thing (I guess) one could say for African-Americans anywhere in the death rate data is that their suicide rate appears to be considerably lower than that of the white population or the population as a whole.

But the homicide data tell an amazingly horrific story. According to this report by the Children’s Defense Fund, the total firearm death rate for black males age 15-19 in 2006 was 67.65 per 100,000 (compared to a rate for white males age 15-19 of 14.40 per 100,000). That figure includes homicides, suicides, and accidents, but among black males 15-19, whose suicide rate is low, about 90% of those gun deaths are homicides.

It really makes me despair for my country. (I live in Texas.)

Relevant characteristics are, of course, income/social status, population density, and so on. Surely you don’t believe that people kill and get killed because they are black or Am. Indian.

Down and Out of Sài Gòn @ 8:
I would guess that the major factor is inter-Cartel violence

Given the numbers at this page (or this article from the El Paso Times), it appears that the homicide rate in Mexico has consistently been about twice that of the US all through the 1980s and 1990s, so cartel-related murders are only a minor factor (though they’re important in specific local cases like Chihuahua during the last 6 years, of course).

I’m shocked at how high Maryland ranks. Do you suppose Baltimore accounts for all of it, or is there something else going on?

For the state-by-state chart the color coding is really badly chosen, it is impossible to distinguish different colors. The fact that they seem to be ordered rather arbitrarily (at least not in any recognizable way like the order at the start or the end) makes it even more impossible.
For instance, there seem to be an interesting “green” state that saw a large increase, which one is that? The other with a large increase (though earlier) was clearly Louisiana. Anyone has an idea, and why?

As I said in the post, you can also look at the states separately, ordered from high to low rates. The state you’re noticing is Delaware.

@17

Wow. That’s pretty striking. So all the other states have been exporting their violent criminals to Delaware?

@19: Delaware is a small state that is close to a couple of major metropolitan areas. It wouldn’t take a large absolute number of spillover crimes to make the rates high.

@22: urbanization is spreading. I notice that Oregon is right down there next to Massachusetts, despite having plenty of heavily armed poor people. Our largest city is Portland, only middling. Could it be this has to do with the way we maintain our cities, eg esp policing policies, esp vis a vis Blacks? Be interesting to see some urban/suburban/rural breakdown.

@20

The rise in Louisiana ended about 2 years before Katrina, so that cannot be the explanation (unless you believe in Deja Vue).

I’ll withhold quoting rap lyrics, but here is a scene:

Furious Styles:I want y’all to look at that sign. See what it says?
“Cash for your home.” You know what that is?

T,C:- It’s a billboard. – Billboard.

F:What are y’all, Amos and Andy?
Are you Steppin’ and he’s Fetchit?
I’m talking about the message. What it stands for.
It’s called “gentrification.”
It’s what happens when property value of a certain area is brought down.
– You listening? – Yeah.
They bring the property value down. They can buy the land cheaper.
Then they move the people out, raise the value and sell it at a profit.
What we need to do is keep everything in our neighbourhood, everything, black.
Black-owned with black money.
Just like the Jews, the Italians, the Mexicans and the Koreans do.
Ain’t nobody from outside bringing down the property value.

O:It’s these folk!
Shooting each other and selling that crack rock and s==t.

F:How you think crack gets into the country?
We don’t own any planes. We don’t own no ships.
We are not the people who are flying and floating that s==t in here.
Every time you turn on a TV, that’s what you see.
Black people selling the rock, pushing the rock. Yeah, I know.
It wasn’t a problem when it was here.
Wasn’t a problem until it was in Iowa…
…and on Wall Street where there’s hardly any black people.
If you want to talk about guns…
…why is it that there’s a gun shop on every corner here?
– Why? – I’ll tell you why.
Just like there’s a liquor store on every corner in the black community.
Why? They want us to kill ourselves.
You go out to Beverly Hills, you don’t see that s==t.
They want to us to kill ourselves.
The best way to destroy a people is to take away their ability to reproduce.
Who is it that’s dying out here on these streets every night? Y’all.
– Yeah. – Young brothers like yourselves.

G:What am I supposed to do? Fool roll up, try to smoke me?
I’m gonna shoot the m======f=====r if he don’t kill me first.

F:You doing exactly what they want you to do.
You have to think, young brother, about your future.

C:Damn, man. You know, Furious is deep.
– He used to be a preacher? –

T: He ain’t never been no preacher.
Just reads a lot.

Boyz n the Hood (1991)

That is a window into some thoughts of the past, stemming from the worst rates. Looking back, I don’t see benevolent gentrifiers swooping down on mid-size cities affected by the violence.

Thinking of another way to grope blindly at explanations – anyone have theories on the rise and fall? 1960 to the present day?

In 1960 things were worse than in other countries in the chart by a bit, but then it just rockets. Things have been improving since 1978 or so… but why?

Age matters, especially with dramatic shifts in generational pop (boom, boom)
As well as income, education, changes in laws/ reporting…
Charts are interesting, causal stories need serious research.

Perhaps someone who actually knows about these things could be invited to guest-blog? Maybe even a panel discussion?

Thanks for the charts!

Where is Vermont?

AcademicLurker @ 30

i think soru at 20 has a good explanation too.

Maybe I’m misinterpreting the views of the majority of commenters here, but it seems odd that a graph of falling violence would elicit calls for stricter laws. Have not gun laws been rather widely loosened during this time of decreased assault deaths?

This is certainly not to say that guns are decreasing crime, especially since ownership rates have been decreasing as well.

Shouldn’t we be focusing on mental health initiatives, environmental protections (lead exposure has a striking relation to juvenile crime), social services generally, access to birth control, and related?

I think David Hackett Fischer’s folkways strains more than a bit on a tribalism born of geographical origins. Culture diverged by latitude for many decades, from the 18th century well into the 20th, with strong economic underpinnings.

The cultural imperatives and lack of empathy and ethics required by an economy centered on plantation slavery poisoned the culture of the Deep South. The violence against the aborginal population was an overlay across the whole country, but a deeper overlay for the Deep South, which had a much larger population of settled Indians to uproot and/or slaughter. The violence of the Wild West, as is well-known, was a consequence of a diaspora of Confederate guerilla fighters from the Civil War, and the migration to the northern urban industrial areas from the South during the 1930s and continuing into the 1950s, gave rise to significant outbreaks of violence and fear of violence.

The crime wave of the late 1960s remains a mystery, but that lead poisoning was a significant contributor seems difficult to doubt.

The cultural incomprehension continues. Most of the country simply cannot comprehend the legal environment surrounding guns and violence in states like Texas and Florida, and the cultural “thinking” that gives rise to it.

The rise of the plutocracy, though, will require that we rationalize, culturally, a great deal of violent repression by security forces in the years ahead.

soru @ 20:

I confess to being a bit skeptical about that explanation… but the apparent correlation between lead levels and crime (roughly twenty years later) over about a century and across multiple countries (e.g., this article) is pretty intriguing.

Academic Lurker @ 31:
The standard explanation I usually hear is that the males of Baby Boom generation were in their prime troublemaking years from roughly 1960 through the late 70s.

The discussions I’ve seen suggest that demographic shifts only seem to account for some of the variation; in particular, the continuation of the decline since ~ 2000 is apparently puzzling given that the Echo Boomers (Baby Boomers’ kids) were entering “prime troublemaking years” then, and should have produced an upturn in crime.

I suppose I should have written British, not “English immigration only.”

AcademicLurker @21

Given that most major American corporations are headquartered in Delaware, yes, other states are sending all of their criminals there :).

Chris Johnson (at 39) – Wikipedia has a nice little map of ancestry by county here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_States

I can’t quickly find estimates of total immigration to the US by country of origin except for the most recent years given in the linked article. I have a memory that German and Irish immigration both exceeded English/Scottish, but I can’t remember where I get this from.

No doubt somebody will conclude that putting all those people in gaol hasn’t helped much, but then no doubt somebody else will reply that without so much incarceration the statistics would look even worse!

Here’s a link to some other US statistics, just for comparison with violent deaths:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/07/2012717104035237926.html

From the second link: “…Fullbrook’s book reminds us that there’s a rational order in the world – that countries can learn from one another’s experience in tackling social problems and challenges, and that by striving to match what already works elsewhere, they can make their own countries better”.

What an optimist that writer is!

I’m with Watson on thinking Bruce’s explanation in genocide and slavery can’t be the whole story. Well, slavery could, I suppose. But Australia has a history of genocide and just can’t mix it up with the US on murder patterns. Britain has a history of colonialism and bad, bad things but has a very low murder rate – but anyone who has lived in London knows that it’s a bad, dangerous place and the problem is not immigration.

So once again, it’s very simple: cohort effects and guns.

Omega Centauri @ 49

That would also apply to every slave plantation in the American South through 1865. If you include Jim Crow that pushes things up to circa 1965.

The point about honour killings being the possible reason for higher murder is an interesting one. Here in the UK, the phrase “honour killings” has come to be attached to a subset of murder carried out by immigrant parents from South Asia, outraged by the Westernised behaviour of their offspring. That does of course come with the usual Daily Hate pile on which closely resembles Islamophobia and/or racism.

It would be interesting to see the statistics though – does a subgroup of the UK population, who might fulfil the criteria outlined above – areas within states where law enforcement doesn’t extend, by neglect or fear or distrust by the locals – also have a statisticall significant higher murder rate? Ie is there a way of measuring this hypothesis by comparison?

I get the impression that in the US context ‘honor killings’ translates into gang violence, hits and retaliations.

“Katherine makes good point—besides “feuding” I would add “dueling.” (Which in Europe would hardly have been tolerated among ordinary folk, I suppose, even at times when aristocrats were expected to defend their honor with arms.)”

It might well have been, with the proviso that it was informal, used fists/clubs/knives rather than swords or guns. The local police/elites could have an attitude that a certain amount of ‘letting off steam’ or ‘dealing with scum’ would be tolerated.

‘Honor or impulse killing. Which could connect to both the Scotch-Irish initial settlers’

I remember hearing a good bit about that a few years ago, (can’t find many links now), how the Scot’s-Irish culture of honour and ‘herder society mentality’ contributed to the high crime rates in the Deep South.
Here’s one link anyway, might be nonsense, I wouldn’t know.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1917113

(Also interestingly, perhaps, crime rates in Northern Ireland and Scotland seem to be higher than any other regions of the UK)

The ethnic discrepancy could be aspirational: everyone wanted to be identified with the aristocratic English gentleman planters of Tidewater Virginia, not with the scrappy lower-class Scots-Irish.

Who colonized the Deep South, MS and AL?

For that matter, Louisiana is the lead state, so maybe Cajun culture should get some scrutiny.

Maryland could be Tidewater, or could just be Baltimore.

South Carolina? It’s high, and the traditional high violence state. Edgefield is long famous for violence, and an article says Scotch-Irish. Also:

“It is an extraordinary historical detail: as late as 1910 white landlords would give each of their black sharecroppers a few lashes of the whip in a little ritual of degradation–a flesh-memory of slavery”

“Does it take a genius to work out why violence levels in Northern Ireland are high…?”

According to the link homicide rates in Northern Ireland are lower than Scotland. (2.3% in Scotland 1.92% Northern Ireland per 100,000 – 1.5% England and Wales – between 2003-2007)

Fischer argues that immigrants to different regions tended to assimilate into the dominant culture. So New England retains many of its old Puritan characteristic, even if the inhabitants aren’t Congregationalists from East Anglia any more.

It seems wildly implausible to me to blame violence in the West on Confederate soldiers, frontiers have been violent places for a long time and all the world over (Canada is unusual in that the mounties arrived before many settlers as described in Keeley’s “War Before Civilization”). And while the tidewater “Cavaliers” of the plantations certainly had a culture of dueling, really serious violence comes from feuding where each attack calls for retaliation. An economy of pastoralism also gives rise to an incentive to frighten others away from stealing your (very mobile) assets through the threat of retaliation. Mountainous areas are both hard for states to “climb” (in James Scott’s terms) and more amenable to pastoralism than intensive agriculture.

Marc, the studies I’ve heard of certainly indicate that black on white crime is more severely punished (legal briefs on the death penalty often point out that bias), but to say crime against blacks is “virtually ignored” seems an understatement. My guess is that there are more people in prison for killing blacks than whites, even while blacks are less adequately protected and vulnerable (I recall Kleiman having some findings on that but can’t recall them now off the top of my head).

If Canada, the U.S & Australia all have little to be proud of regarding their treatment of indigenous populations, which nation may be proudest? What little I’ve heard of Finland’s treatment of the Saami doesn’t sound too bad. Among the Anglosphere settler nations, Canada seems to come off looking best, but that could just be my ignorance talking.

@63
Changes things a bit if we try to think of John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate as “aspirational,” though, doesn’t it? Fascinating.

bianca steel @ 62

This is very hard to reconcile with what people are saying about the Scots-Irish heritage, though.

Having grown up embedded in that culture, (a father who was half Appalachian hillbilly, half Pennsylvania Dutch, but was raised on the hillbilly side), I can tell you from personal experience that inviting someone outside (away from the womenfolk) was as common to the culture as breathing. Insults, even subtle ones, required a man to offer to inflict a beating on the offender. If he didn’t, he wasn’t a man. On later reflection, I suppose it was the freeholder’s equivalent to dueling, as no weapons were usually involved, although one didn’t shy away from using weapons if the offender brandished them first.

Excellent graphs!
Looking at the one that overlays individual US regions with the other countries highlights that it’s somewhat hard to reconcile the strong trend in the overall US OECD number with the regional numbers. It’s complicated because of course the four regions don’t have the same populations, and total populations in region/country may have changed, but in the overlap region, the only one that shows a decline from start to end is the midwest, and that decline is proportionally smaller than the OECD US decline. Any sense of what’s going on? if you add all the CDC numbers together do they come out at all comparable to the trends in the OECD?

“The “Cavalier” culture is Tidewater/plantation culture (think Washington and Jefferson); the Scots-Irish culture is Appalachia (think Davy Crockett and Andrew Jackson).

They are very different cultures, and historically do not get along very well with each other”

Quite so. Violence also played different roles in those cultures, even though honor played a central role in both.

On the Tidewater Cavalier culture side, the role of violence was the enforcement of a strict hierarchical order. The violence flowed from the superior against the subordinate or the equal — and the occasional violence from the inferior was rare.

Here is Fischer:

Violence was thought to be the legitimate instrument of masters against servants, husbands against wives, parents against children, and gentlemen against ordinary folk. But violent acts by servants against masters, or common folk against gentle folk was followed by savage punishment.

This was not the case in the Appalachian culture. There the expectation was one of equal esteem, regardless of one’s rank or wealth. Visitors who thought of themselves as being of high-rank were complaining about a lack of deference in the backcountry:

The Anglican missionary Charles Woodmason filled his journal with angry accounts of “ill treatment” by “insolent” and “impudent” settlers who stubbornly refused to display the deference which he thought his due. He complained that these people were “the most audacious of any set of mortals I ever met with.”

Violence was still linked to defending honor, but in a different way:

In the backcountry, honor had very little to do with gentility.[…] Backcountry ideas of honor were understood more in terms of valor and virility. To behave dishonorably was to commit an “unmanly act.” Folk punishments in the backcountry were designed to inflict humiliation by depriving an offender of his manhood — sometimes in a direct and literal sense.

Violence often took the form of family or clan feuds, and a powerful hostility against strangers (where a stranger was anyone not in the extended family or in the neighborhood) was ubiquitous. There was also a strong preference for avoiding legal institutions and settling disputes in a non-legal framework:

The mother of President Jackson prepared her son for this world with some very strong advice.”Andrew,” said she, “never tell a lie, nor take what is not your own, nor sue anybody for slander, assault and battery. Always settle them cases yourself.”

Sometimes, the lack of respect for legal institutions manifested itself against magistrates:

In 1767, when several gentlemen justices in South Carolina tried to bring some “banditti” to trial, the magistrates themselves were seized and tried before a kangaroo court by the intended defendants. One justice was dragged eighty miles at a horse’s tail.

This is just a sample of the evidence David Hackett Fischer offers supporting the case for a tradition of violence in the Appalachian culture. But it seems to me that the above is sufficient to show that you simply can not treat Puritan New England and the backcountry in remotely similar ways, when you analyze the role of violence in those cultures. Even the Tidewater Cavalier culture deserves a separate treatment.

@22: The lead theory has MASSIVE amounts of evidence behind it.

Nowadays the main lead exposure is from firing guns (a lot of the lead in the bullets evaporates). Lead bullets need to be banned in favor of iron bullets. This would probably cause the NRA to become sane within a generation!

Wattson @47 & 80: why does the US bear the legacy of slavery and colonization but not Manchester, France, or Spain despite even darker pasts?

Much more violence in the the South and Latin America is exactly what I would expect from Bruce’s logic. I thought this is obvious, but maybe I misunderstood your question? Spain and former Spanish colonies (for example) aren’t some monolithic, tightly-connected social entity. The colonists are linked to Spain mainly by descent. Spanish colonists came from Spain, yes, but while there was a long period when Spain could claim political sovereignty, there was not close social contact between European imperial centers and their colonies–i.e. how many Spanish, French, or British in Europe ever actually met a Black slave or a native American, much less dealt with them on a daily basis? Violence lives on in places where the violence was actually inflicted, among descendants of people who were doing or receiving it, not people who were only distantly connected to them via political sovereignty and sharing the same language and ancestors (i.e. Europeans). Unlike Europeans, Spanish ‘creoles’ in the Americas were, if not directly involved in the violence of colonialism, then far, far closer to it. And Native Americans had to live in fear of it. So of course it is in the Americas where that violence lives on. Not that the colonial relationship as a whole didn’t have a profound effect on European attitudes, and shape their behavior when, for example, later generations traveled outside Europe (see e.g. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes, on this, or Said’s Culture and Imperialism), but that is a different relationship from the direct and personal one that exists in the colonies where the violence actually took place.

(I guess you could consider current European hostility to (especially) non-European immigrants a legacy of colonialism more generally, since that history of colonialism is the outstanding factor shaping European attitudes towards Asians, Africans, and other ethnic others, i.e. the obvious connection between European colonialism and the rise of theories about race, and the way these theories were mobilized against Jews in Europe, by the Nazis). And I have heard it said that the brutality of WWI and WWII were partly a legacy of the violence of colonialism, because various Europeans acquired a belief in their own invincibility and a habit of using all kinds of indiscriminately violent tactics (e.g. chemical weapons) on their (non-European) enemies.)

To which historical pattern of settlement is the violence on the South Side of Chicago linkable?

The Great Migration? Aren’t most Blacks on the South Side are descendants of slaves, just like most other Blacks in the US, and thus inheritors of a culture that was profoundly shaped both by slavery and by interaction with the ‘Cavalier’ culture of the Deep South? Am I missing something here?

Watson Ladd @ 80
They weren’t necessarily fighting on the side of the Union by choice. The NYC draft riots were sparked by the immigrant resentment of being drafted to fight a war they had no interest in.

How much then does the culture of “honour”, however that is expressed in a particular geographical area, cross over with a toxic masculinity? It seems to me, just going on descriptions above you understand, that both the Cavalier “honour” and the Appalachian “honour” have some commonalities in the expectation that a man must act in a certain way, and be expected to react to insult (to him, or his -property- woman) in a certain way, and those ways involve a display of strength via violence.

Bruce Wilder, I am not saying that confederate soldiers were absent from the west or did not commit violence. I am saying frontiers are violent even in their absence. The U.S had a violent frontier in the colonial era as well.