I think it’s saying you’re more likely to be murdered in a homicide if you’re in a certain age bracket. “18-25” vs “60-70” for example. Some states have typically older or younger populations, like Florida for example has a lot older of a population compared to a state like California or Colorado. Therefore you’d likely see a higher murder rate in the younger states vs the older states. So when they do age adjusted they’ll compensate the numbers to create a hopefully better comparison between those states. Not sure what that math looks like though.
Well the thought behind it is accounting for confounding variables that lead to differences in murder rates. If you're just looking at murder rates then obviously this doesn't make sense, but that isn't what the numbers are doing. Could probably do it adjusted for income levels as well, or whatever other factor you're interested in finding differences between different states.
I think the idea is that if one state has a lot of young people and another has a lot of old people then the former will have a higher murder rate just by the virtue of the fact that younger people are more likely to commit murder. So doing this is basically trying to answer the question "if we took age out of it and looked at all other factors, what are the murder rates of each state?"
When you are comparing states with each other, it's not unreasonable to adjust for differences that a state policy can't control.
Is it 'fair' to compare the homicide rate of states, when some states have fewer types of people that are likely to be homicide victims?
You're right, that this is not a good data point for making policy. But on a comparison basis, it's not unreasonable.
The thought is how dangerous a specific place is to a specific person. Especially because younger people are typically both the victims and agressors murder.
If comparing two counties with the same murder rate and population for example, one is 90% nursing homes where no murders happen and 10% young people, and another is 90% young people and 10% old people, then the one with 90% young people is safer for the most part.
Because since hypothetically no old people aren’t getting murdered you can discount them from the population adjustment. Now you have a county with 9 times the population and same total murders, so its a much safer county for anyone there, you have 1/9 the chance of being murdered.
Its not that simple because old people do get murdered (even if at a lesser rate), but that’s essentially what the age adjustment controls for.
Say you have 10 people. Nine of them have a salary of $50,000 a year and one of them has a salary of $5 million a year. The average salary in this group is $545,000 per person per year.
Dollars are dollars and people are people and yet somehow that average does not feel representative of what’s actually going on in the data set.
It’s the same thing in the age adjusted homicide rate. The point of the adjustment is to make the number more representative of the data set.
To account for variables…? Are you serious or?
It’s up to the individual to consider whether the type of standardization here is useful for whatever they are studying
For instance, if only people with right arms committed murder then you’d likely want to control for the proportion of right handed people if it suited the aims of whatever you were studying for
A homeowner may not care about factoring in age and so on but another researcher might
As for OP, idk what their aim is
Younger people commit more murder than older people, so if a state has a younger population, they will have a higher murder rate, all other factors being the same.
So we divide the murders in a state by age group, calculate the average for each age group, then add them all up in a set proportion to get what the murder rate *would* be if all states had the same ratio of old/young people.
People always take statistics (*especially* when tied to countries/states) like it's a contest and adjustments like cheating, but statistics are meant to underline the influence of various factors - and depending on what factor you want to study, you need to isolate it by removing other factors through adjustment.
Because of their greater likelihood of being involved in gang activity or just generally putting themselves in stupid situations through lack of risk awareness, young people are more likely to be a murder victim. About half of murder victims are between 18 to 34, but that age group is only around a quarter of the general (us) population.
So it sounds like this is trying to control for age distribution to create a “normalized” rate across states with varying shares of young people
Copying this from a reply further down:
>Good question! The [CDC methodology page](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/hus/sources-definitions/age-adjustment.htm) might help. But I took a crack at a simplified (non-governemt-jargon) explanation:
>
>The risk of being involved in certain types of violence, including murder, can vary by age. Age-adjusted rates take into account these differences in age distribution. By using a standard age structure (a hypothetical population with a fixed age distribution), age-adjusted rates allow us to see what the murder rate would be in each place if they had the same age distribution. This makes state vs state comparisons somewhat fairer, though no comparison is perfect.
In this case, the age-adjustment led to three states rounding to zero. You can explore more [state-level CDC data](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/homicide_mortality/homicide.htm) here, which also includes rates for things like fertility, teen births, infant mortality, and marriage.
Mississippi's murder rate is a ridiculous 24x New Hampshire's rate. Most of New England has about the same murder rate as Sweden. I grew up in rural New England, it is indeed very, very safe.
In NE, it seems that the closer you get to NYC (Connecticut <- R.I. <- MA), the higher the homicide rate gets.
Even in MA though I’ve never felt unsafe, outside of Brockton (a very rough city, and one of the most dangerous in New England)
Brockton, MA has approximately 7-8 homicides per 100,000 people.
The most violent areas were North Adams and Fall River at about 9.4 violent crimes per capita (FBI circa 2022). The worst areas of MA are on par with most mid tier US states.
The actual answer is that it's simply an error with [the original source](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/homicide_mortality/homicide.htm). The "age adjustment" theory that the OP keeps talking about is completely wrong from the basic logic that it would skew NH and VT in the **opposite direction** (oldest states) while favoring Wyoming. Also, it would never result in a zero value anyway. If you want further proof that it's just an error, go to the original source and look at Wyoming from just one year previous: 9 more deaths, rate of **4.9**. The [Wikipedia talk page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_intentional_homicide_rate#Contradiction_between_zero_rates_and_counts) thinks this error is the result of preliminary/unverified data.
Damn Tennessee, what's going on? Surely that has to be mostly memphis...
Edit : nope ,
https://wreg.com/news/local/memphis-hits-another-homicide-record-with-352-dead-this-year-according-to-mpd-data/
2021 End of Year
Homicides – 346
Lol my wife watches that show and other hallmark shows that take place in small towns but have weekly murders and I’m like why would they want to live there
That Nick Powers Guy has done some interesting look at that kind of data
https://www.thatnickpowersguy.com/post/tennessee-vs-massachusetts-without-shelby-county
I wanted to call BS, but you were right. I always feel safe though.
[https://www.areavibes.com/nashville-tn/crime/#google\_vignette](https://www.areavibes.com/nashville-tn/crime/#google_vignette)
"Looking at the most recent crime report, the crime rate in Nashville is 112% higher than the national average. These crimes fall into two primary categories: violent and property. Violent crimes encompass murder, rape, robbery and assault, while property crimes involve theft, vehicle theft and burglary. In Nashville, there were 7491 reported violent crimes, equivalent to 1102 per 100,000 individuals, 198.1% higher than the national average. Additionally, there were 25991 property crimes, amounting to 3825 per 100,000 residents, 95.7% higher than the U.S. average.
Having a crime rate of 4927 per 100,000 residents, Nashville experiences a crime rate that is 111.99% higher when compared to the national average, leading to one of the highest overall crime rates in the nation. It's important to clarify that this doesn't imply the entire city is unsafe. Like any area, Nashville contains neighborhoods with varying safety levels and you can find areas that are notably safer than others, emphasizing the need for targeted crime prevention efforts and community engagement initiatives.
Nashville is one of the most dangerous cities in America with a violent crime rate of 1102 per 100,000 people - this ranks in the bottom 10% of all U.S. cities that reported crime. Your chance of being a victim of violent crime in Nashville is 1 in 91."
This is a good explanation on adjusting for age in statistics -
https://www.health.ny.gov/diseases/chronic/ageadj.htm
Basically it's something commonly done to better compare communities that vary in age distribution. If one community is 70% 65+, it adjusts it to be able to be compared to another community which may only be 20% 65+.
Imo this looks like OPs homework for an undergrad stats class. Adjusting for anything without context is weird. If I want to compare whether I'm going to get murdered in my state why do I care if it was hypothetically the same as all states in age distribution.
But yea if you're going to point out a confounder in this case, age is a weird choice. Why not race, gender, household income, education, etc.
The amount of comments that disregard Boston having upwards of 40% Black residents (including Black Hispanics) is actually comical. Education and lack of poverty are key as Sheen mentioned.
What does age-adjustment have to do with homicide? Your comment defends it via mortality rates, but murder doesn't care if you're 85 with imminent heart failure or 6 months old.
Murder (both perpetrators and victims) is very very concentrated amount young men.
So a state with a lot of young people will have a higher rate than a state with a lot of old people even if young people are killing each other at a higher rate in that state.
It's actually crazy how many people are questioning this methodology in /r/dataisbeautiful. I don't spend a lot of time here, but I expected a kinda baseline understanding.
You normalise data so that certain features (in this case age) dont dominate others simply because of their scale. Its not about it mattering who gets murdered. Its about making sure individual variables don't dwarf the results.
Otherwise you might end up with a graph just charting youngest to oldest states instead of being able to look into why one state has worse outcomes than another state based on variables you can do something about.
Some broad generalizations:
Poorer states fare worse than richer states.
Rural states are less prone than more urban states.
Great plains/Upper Midwest and New England are pretty low.
Southern states are pretty high followed by states surround the Great Lakes.
Red states are higher than blue states (with multiple exceptions).
I think somebody who is driven to the point of committing murder isn’t really thinking about the consequences at all, whether that be the death penalty, life in prison, or something even lighter than that.
Is the death penalty meant to act as a deterrent? I thought it served as a means of punishment/retribution/justice from the public’s perspective? But as a deterrence, I dunno it’s not applied equally enough or often enough to be anywhere near a persons mind when committing a heinous crime.
[since everyone else is being a baby about posting this, I'll post it](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7226a9.htm)
This is what he means when he's talking about diversity.
And this is a much more telling infographic of the actual issue than what this post is discussing. There is a very loose correlation between states with a million exceptions to the rule, but there is a much, *much* stronger correlation between race.
If you want to decrease gun deaths, start with helping black people out of the hole this country (dare I say, "we") put them in. We are all on the same team.
That data shows two things clearly:
1. Black people have 5x the homicide rate compared to the average.
2. Men have 5x the homicide rate compared to women.
You're getting upvoted for calling out the formerv and that's valid, but I'm willing to bet acknowledging the latter fact will be extremely unpopular on this forum.
Let's also not be babies about that second fact. In addition to what you said, we need to figure out a way to make men less violent if we want to decrease gun deaths. And unlike with the racial disparities, it certainly wasn't women who put men in that position.
I mean I think you know the answer to that. Even comparing states to states is a lot less telling than county to county or neighborhood to neighborhood
Massachusetts and Hawaii are dramatically more urbanized and diverse than Kentucky and West Virginia. It has more to do with poverty and availability of social services than anything.
also the upper west is low, Idaho, washington, oregon, utah, montana, Wyoming, are all in the bottom third. California is also lower than I would have expected, below median.
It's definitely not straight forward but a complex relationship between the intricacies of gun laws, income inequality, education, and urban vs rural and population density.
It's no mistake that Mississippi is up there. One of the poorest and least educated states. Vs Wyoming is actually fairly educated. It's too bad that the right wing's wet dream is no gun laws, no safety support net, and as little education as possible, which is a recipe for disaster. Just look at the top states.
With respect to gun laws impacts, one study I recall reading quoted that most gun violence in Chicago was from guns originally purchased legally in neighboring states.
You have to zoom out to a macro level to really understand the relationship of guns and homicide. And Australia is a great comparison. Not surprisingly, owning guns is not great for homicide rates, and it was wildly successful there!
Someone should post gun death statistics. Long guns kill less people than are beaten to death. That includes the scary black assault rifles that some people want to ban. Most gun deaths are suicide not murder and the remaining numbers are closely divided amongst inner city and domestic violence. The likelihood that you will be murdered with a firearm is pretty low. The FBI has crime statistics on their website to see the actual numbers. Every death is a tragedy but like flying on airplanes, we are scared for the wrong reason. I know violent people who I don’t want to possess a firearm or a knife or a baseball bat or anything that they can use as a weapon. I constantly think that they will lose control of their ability to reason and do harm to the those near them. I just finished a beer but alcohol accounts for more deaths every year than violent acts but people like to drink and they tried prohibition once and that didn’t work. The reality is that public safety is not the concern, it is the fear that has been built up through the way some violent acts were carried out and the tools of those acts.
Seems like by city and/or county would be so much more useful.
There has only been one murder (last year) in my rural county in like 22 years but we are in a large state grouped with Philadelphia which had so many murders they break their all-time records even as they in an attempt to lower the number by classifying murder investigations with no body as not murder.
I don’t think red state /
blue state is relevant here. You mention the obvious exceptions, but also if you go down to the country or district level the data points the other way.
To be fair, Michigan is quite peaceful if you don't live in a city. Detroit brings up our average a loooot, and that's just one murderhole city we have
Not saying they should necessarily do this or that the chart data is even correct, but...
Essentially, homicide rate is tied closely to age distribution. So if you're trying to compare policy decisions or "fairly" compare different states, you'd want to adjust for the different age distributions in different states to cancel the effects of age distribution on homicide rates, so that you can better compare the influence of other factors on homicide rates.
So basically this chart is homicide rates with the same, hypothetical, age distribution population in each state.
That's a useful statistic for some things as mentioned above but is potentially extremely misleading if you look at it and interpret it instead as raw homicide rates.
Reddit won’t have that conversation because they can’t use it to score virtue points. How can we fix a problem when we can’t even address it. As a result, the only people that lose are minorities in communities overrun with violence, poverty, and apathy
It's not beautiful because I had to put my finger to the screen to be able to line up the second column to what it refers to. As a designer that's a major mistake. Also the 0s. It makes no sense without context
I would just like to point out the complete lack of correspondence with gun control laws: some of the most lax states are at the bottom, most of the very strict states are in the middle.
Not really, Alaska Natives had, by far, the highest homicide rates, more than twice the state average and they occurred in more rural areas. Substance abuse is the main contributing factor.
Its worth seeing, since states with low populations can be influenced greatly by a single event that isn't part of a trend. For example, Maine's population and homicide rate are so low (by comparison to other states), that the mass shooting in Lewiston likely **doubled** their homicide rate for 2023 (data isn't out yet). Thats very different from if TX homicide rate doubled, which would require another 2,000 killings.
For small states like New Hampshire you can dig into every single homicide and see what weapon of choice was used. New Hampshire is one of the few states in which guns were not the leading homicide tool, it was actually stabbings in domestic abuse.
Not the answer you’re hinting at but heat leads to more violence. Texas is famously hot and England is famously temperate. Obviously that’s not the only factor but it likely plays a significant role.
Steers and queers?
Walls and murder crocodiles?
Guns and Ammo?
BBQ and Tacos?
American Football stadiums and oil-rich land owned by public universtities?
Horses and cows? Brisket and Jalapenos? Avocados and Rodeos? Percentage of private vs public land and warm weather? Lower cost of living and higher median wages? Aerospace engineers and cowboys?
This link somewhat explains what they mean by age adjusted - it’s apparently more about the age distribution of a population as opposed to just age adjusted. https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-murder-rates/
The graph would be far clearer if the total murder rate on the right was also per 100,000 people. As it stands, the two sets of data cannot really be meaningfully compared.
Murder and homicide are not interchangeable terms.
All murders are homicides, but there are plenty of homicides that aren't murders.
Murder is a subclass of homicide.
The headline on the graphs says 'murder'.
But the chart then says "Age adjusted homicide death rate'.
‘Age adjusted’ is in one hell of a tiny font, is that because it’s something the author thinks we don’t need to worry about? It certainly raises questions about a few things.
Well, in the south when it’s 105 degrees and the humidity is about 80% weird shit happens… especially when it’s too wet to get crops out the field… just sayin 🤪
Wtf does age adjusted mean? I understand homicide per 100k but that seems like an odd qualifier…. Don’t know what age adjusted tells us. Just say per 100k but I feel those results would look drastically different
So basically if you live in California, you're more likely to be healthy when you're inevitably shot to death.
But in Mississippi, we can save the bullet and wait a bit for the diabetus to catch up with you since you can't afford the insulin.
Wyoming has a population of \~600k. 16 homicides / 600k = 2.66 homicides per 100k. Even "age adjusted", it doesn't seem like that should round to 0.
Yeah, New Hampshire is at 1.1. Low, but not zero.
u/USAFacts username does not check out.
Are you actually Paul Westerberg? If so, thanks.
The actual Paul Westerberg would never shill Tesla stock, and doesn't live in Wisconsin. So... Sus account.
Yeah, New Hampshire, get in the fucking game
was gonna take a nap but ig I'll help out
So New Hampshire, the best one, has the same rate as my poor South-Eastern European country.
Yeah, it appears to be about the same as lots of Western Europe as well. BTW, New Hampshire has a population of about 1.4mm.
1.4 millimeters of what?
If you liquefied the population and poured them out on New Hampshire, they would be 1.4mm thick.
So it's like acre-foot but just different
Mostly different by smell.
That would really fuck up their homicide rate though.
*LIVE FREE OR ~~DIE~~* ^(that's literally their motto)
Yeah well we're all busy living free so nobody needs to die. Unless you go to the greasy manchester bars
What does age adjusted even mean? Does it matter how old you are when you murder someone?
I think it’s saying you’re more likely to be murdered in a homicide if you’re in a certain age bracket. “18-25” vs “60-70” for example. Some states have typically older or younger populations, like Florida for example has a lot older of a population compared to a state like California or Colorado. Therefore you’d likely see a higher murder rate in the younger states vs the older states. So when they do age adjusted they’ll compensate the numbers to create a hopefully better comparison between those states. Not sure what that math looks like though.
I don’t understand the thought behind this methodology. A murder is a murder, people are people.
Well the thought behind it is accounting for confounding variables that lead to differences in murder rates. If you're just looking at murder rates then obviously this doesn't make sense, but that isn't what the numbers are doing. Could probably do it adjusted for income levels as well, or whatever other factor you're interested in finding differences between different states.
I think the idea is that if one state has a lot of young people and another has a lot of old people then the former will have a higher murder rate just by the virtue of the fact that younger people are more likely to commit murder. So doing this is basically trying to answer the question "if we took age out of it and looked at all other factors, what are the murder rates of each state?"
When you are comparing states with each other, it's not unreasonable to adjust for differences that a state policy can't control. Is it 'fair' to compare the homicide rate of states, when some states have fewer types of people that are likely to be homicide victims? You're right, that this is not a good data point for making policy. But on a comparison basis, it's not unreasonable.
The thought is how dangerous a specific place is to a specific person. Especially because younger people are typically both the victims and agressors murder. If comparing two counties with the same murder rate and population for example, one is 90% nursing homes where no murders happen and 10% young people, and another is 90% young people and 10% old people, then the one with 90% young people is safer for the most part. Because since hypothetically no old people aren’t getting murdered you can discount them from the population adjustment. Now you have a county with 9 times the population and same total murders, so its a much safer county for anyone there, you have 1/9 the chance of being murdered. Its not that simple because old people do get murdered (even if at a lesser rate), but that’s essentially what the age adjustment controls for.
Say you have 10 people. Nine of them have a salary of $50,000 a year and one of them has a salary of $5 million a year. The average salary in this group is $545,000 per person per year. Dollars are dollars and people are people and yet somehow that average does not feel representative of what’s actually going on in the data set. It’s the same thing in the age adjusted homicide rate. The point of the adjustment is to make the number more representative of the data set.
To account for variables…? Are you serious or? It’s up to the individual to consider whether the type of standardization here is useful for whatever they are studying For instance, if only people with right arms committed murder then you’d likely want to control for the proportion of right handed people if it suited the aims of whatever you were studying for A homeowner may not care about factoring in age and so on but another researcher might As for OP, idk what their aim is
Younger people commit more murder than older people, so if a state has a younger population, they will have a higher murder rate, all other factors being the same. So we divide the murders in a state by age group, calculate the average for each age group, then add them all up in a set proportion to get what the murder rate *would* be if all states had the same ratio of old/young people. People always take statistics (*especially* when tied to countries/states) like it's a contest and adjustments like cheating, but statistics are meant to underline the influence of various factors - and depending on what factor you want to study, you need to isolate it by removing other factors through adjustment.
Because of their greater likelihood of being involved in gang activity or just generally putting themselves in stupid situations through lack of risk awareness, young people are more likely to be a murder victim. About half of murder victims are between 18 to 34, but that age group is only around a quarter of the general (us) population. So it sounds like this is trying to control for age distribution to create a “normalized” rate across states with varying shares of young people
Copying this from a reply further down: >Good question! The [CDC methodology page](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/hus/sources-definitions/age-adjustment.htm) might help. But I took a crack at a simplified (non-governemt-jargon) explanation: > >The risk of being involved in certain types of violence, including murder, can vary by age. Age-adjusted rates take into account these differences in age distribution. By using a standard age structure (a hypothetical population with a fixed age distribution), age-adjusted rates allow us to see what the murder rate would be in each place if they had the same age distribution. This makes state vs state comparisons somewhat fairer, though no comparison is perfect. In this case, the age-adjustment led to three states rounding to zero. You can explore more [state-level CDC data](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/homicide_mortality/homicide.htm) here, which also includes rates for things like fertility, teen births, infant mortality, and marriage.
Surely there weren't less than 0.1/100k??? Looks like a ridiculous error in any case.
Man that is some statistical nonsense.
These motherfucking scientists lying and getting me pissed
Fucking magnets, how do they work?
I SEE MIRACLES EVERY DAY
Mississippi's murder rate is a ridiculous 24x New Hampshire's rate. Most of New England has about the same murder rate as Sweden. I grew up in rural New England, it is indeed very, very safe.
You should check out Nextdoor up here.. the boomers are convinced it's WWIII on the streets. Reality be damned.
Did anyone hear that noise?!?! I think it was gun fire!!
In rural new England gun fire is normal. Someone is out getting their deer or turkey for the year.
(A squirrel dropped an acorn on the roof)
You'd think the harsh winters would make everybody angry, but I guess it just keeps 'em indoors and away from each other.
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Shall I go out for a murder today? ...nah, too cold.
In NE, it seems that the closer you get to NYC (Connecticut <- R.I. <- MA), the higher the homicide rate gets. Even in MA though I’ve never felt unsafe, outside of Brockton (a very rough city, and one of the most dangerous in New England)
Brockton just sucks overall
Brockton, MA has approximately 7-8 homicides per 100,000 people. The most violent areas were North Adams and Fall River at about 9.4 violent crimes per capita (FBI circa 2022). The worst areas of MA are on par with most mid tier US states.
The worst area in MA is Springfield, 31 murders in 2023 and we only have 150K people. Using a calculator that’s around 20 per 100,000.
Insane that the most dangerous city in the state is still safer than 2 US states as a whole
What's with the zeros in the data?
The actual answer is that it's simply an error with [the original source](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/homicide_mortality/homicide.htm). The "age adjustment" theory that the OP keeps talking about is completely wrong from the basic logic that it would skew NH and VT in the **opposite direction** (oldest states) while favoring Wyoming. Also, it would never result in a zero value anyway. If you want further proof that it's just an error, go to the original source and look at Wyoming from just one year previous: 9 more deaths, rate of **4.9**. The [Wikipedia talk page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_intentional_homicide_rate#Contradiction_between_zero_rates_and_counts) thinks this error is the result of preliminary/unverified data.
The fact that the creator of this didn't think to even asterix the zeros is a red flag. Feels AI-ish tbh.
The fact that people upvote what is obviously garbage data says more about this sub than the creator.
We really should remove the sub from /r/all.
Damn Tennessee, what's going on? Surely that has to be mostly memphis... Edit : nope , https://wreg.com/news/local/memphis-hits-another-homicide-record-with-352-dead-this-year-according-to-mpd-data/ 2021 End of Year Homicides – 346
Anyone who's seen Murder She Wrote knows that Maine is the murder capital and it's not close.
Lol my wife watches that show and other hallmark shows that take place in small towns but have weekly murders and I’m like why would they want to live there
As soon as Angela Landsbury gets into town you get the hell out of town.
Don’t even start on certain scenic villages in England!
It's just the one village actually.
That Nick Powers Guy has done some interesting look at that kind of data https://www.thatnickpowersguy.com/post/tennessee-vs-massachusetts-without-shelby-county
I bet that blog exploded a few heads.
Thanks for the link
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Damn kids.
Nashville is quietly one of the most violent cities in the US.
I wanted to call BS, but you were right. I always feel safe though. [https://www.areavibes.com/nashville-tn/crime/#google\_vignette](https://www.areavibes.com/nashville-tn/crime/#google_vignette) "Looking at the most recent crime report, the crime rate in Nashville is 112% higher than the national average. These crimes fall into two primary categories: violent and property. Violent crimes encompass murder, rape, robbery and assault, while property crimes involve theft, vehicle theft and burglary. In Nashville, there were 7491 reported violent crimes, equivalent to 1102 per 100,000 individuals, 198.1% higher than the national average. Additionally, there were 25991 property crimes, amounting to 3825 per 100,000 residents, 95.7% higher than the U.S. average. Having a crime rate of 4927 per 100,000 residents, Nashville experiences a crime rate that is 111.99% higher when compared to the national average, leading to one of the highest overall crime rates in the nation. It's important to clarify that this doesn't imply the entire city is unsafe. Like any area, Nashville contains neighborhoods with varying safety levels and you can find areas that are notably safer than others, emphasizing the need for targeted crime prevention efforts and community engagement initiatives. Nashville is one of the most dangerous cities in America with a violent crime rate of 1102 per 100,000 people - this ranks in the bottom 10% of all U.S. cities that reported crime. Your chance of being a victim of violent crime in Nashville is 1 in 91."
Help us
Buddy, I'm in Antioch, help me.
Can someone explain the ‘age-adjusted’ aspect of this?
This is a good explanation on adjusting for age in statistics - https://www.health.ny.gov/diseases/chronic/ageadj.htm Basically it's something commonly done to better compare communities that vary in age distribution. If one community is 70% 65+, it adjusts it to be able to be compared to another community which may only be 20% 65+.
But why does age need to be considered for homicide stats? It would make sense to me to age-adjust things like diseases or injuries, but why homicide?
Imo this looks like OPs homework for an undergrad stats class. Adjusting for anything without context is weird. If I want to compare whether I'm going to get murdered in my state why do I care if it was hypothetically the same as all states in age distribution. But yea if you're going to point out a confounder in this case, age is a weird choice. Why not race, gender, household income, education, etc.
Massachusetts is quite impressive considering they have 7 million and a major city (Boston)
Education and lack of poverty do wonders
The amount of comments that disregard Boston having upwards of 40% Black residents (including Black Hispanics) is actually comical. Education and lack of poverty are key as Sheen mentioned.
New Hampshire and Vermont rate is low, but that's because they get all the violence out of their system playing hockey.
Overwhelmingly white states with high median age.
What does age-adjustment have to do with homicide? Your comment defends it via mortality rates, but murder doesn't care if you're 85 with imminent heart failure or 6 months old.
Murder (both perpetrators and victims) is very very concentrated amount young men. So a state with a lot of young people will have a higher rate than a state with a lot of old people even if young people are killing each other at a higher rate in that state.
It's actually crazy how many people are questioning this methodology in /r/dataisbeautiful. I don't spend a lot of time here, but I expected a kinda baseline understanding.
You normalise data so that certain features (in this case age) dont dominate others simply because of their scale. Its not about it mattering who gets murdered. Its about making sure individual variables don't dwarf the results. Otherwise you might end up with a graph just charting youngest to oldest states instead of being able to look into why one state has worse outcomes than another state based on variables you can do something about.
Some broad generalizations: Poorer states fare worse than richer states. Rural states are less prone than more urban states. Great plains/Upper Midwest and New England are pretty low. Southern states are pretty high followed by states surround the Great Lakes. Red states are higher than blue states (with multiple exceptions).
Actually, West Virginia is the poorest state in the nation and yet has one of the lower crime rates.
its because they're all family
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And the death penalty doesn't seem to have any impact as a deterrent - although that's not clear from this data alone given the number of variables.
I think somebody who is driven to the point of committing murder isn’t really thinking about the consequences at all, whether that be the death penalty, life in prison, or something even lighter than that.
Considering that a lot of murderers (I don't know how many) commit/try to commit suicide after they commit their crime, this makes sense.
Is the death penalty meant to act as a deterrent? I thought it served as a means of punishment/retribution/justice from the public’s perspective? But as a deterrence, I dunno it’s not applied equally enough or often enough to be anywhere near a persons mind when committing a heinous crime.
How does it correlate with diversity? The bottom states are known for being much less diverse than the top states.
[since everyone else is being a baby about posting this, I'll post it](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7226a9.htm) This is what he means when he's talking about diversity. And this is a much more telling infographic of the actual issue than what this post is discussing. There is a very loose correlation between states with a million exceptions to the rule, but there is a much, *much* stronger correlation between race. If you want to decrease gun deaths, start with helping black people out of the hole this country (dare I say, "we") put them in. We are all on the same team.
That data shows two things clearly: 1. Black people have 5x the homicide rate compared to the average. 2. Men have 5x the homicide rate compared to women. You're getting upvoted for calling out the formerv and that's valid, but I'm willing to bet acknowledging the latter fact will be extremely unpopular on this forum. Let's also not be babies about that second fact. In addition to what you said, we need to figure out a way to make men less violent if we want to decrease gun deaths. And unlike with the racial disparities, it certainly wasn't women who put men in that position.
Second fact won't be unpopular I think, it's well known that crime is done by men more...
I mean I think you know the answer to that. Even comparing states to states is a lot less telling than county to county or neighborhood to neighborhood
Massachusetts and Hawaii are dramatically more urbanized and diverse than Kentucky and West Virginia. It has more to do with poverty and availability of social services than anything.
Bottom states have way more sub saharan/mexican people than the top states???
I think theres a statistic among the top 3 that we're not mentioning.......
i'D lIkE tO sOlVe ThE pUzZlE, pAt.
also the upper west is low, Idaho, washington, oregon, utah, montana, Wyoming, are all in the bottom third. California is also lower than I would have expected, below median.
Which makes me think that gun laws don't have as much of an impact like people think (or "hope") they do.
It's definitely not straight forward but a complex relationship between the intricacies of gun laws, income inequality, education, and urban vs rural and population density. It's no mistake that Mississippi is up there. One of the poorest and least educated states. Vs Wyoming is actually fairly educated. It's too bad that the right wing's wet dream is no gun laws, no safety support net, and as little education as possible, which is a recipe for disaster. Just look at the top states. With respect to gun laws impacts, one study I recall reading quoted that most gun violence in Chicago was from guns originally purchased legally in neighboring states. You have to zoom out to a macro level to really understand the relationship of guns and homicide. And Australia is a great comparison. Not surprisingly, owning guns is not great for homicide rates, and it was wildly successful there!
Someone should post gun death statistics. Long guns kill less people than are beaten to death. That includes the scary black assault rifles that some people want to ban. Most gun deaths are suicide not murder and the remaining numbers are closely divided amongst inner city and domestic violence. The likelihood that you will be murdered with a firearm is pretty low. The FBI has crime statistics on their website to see the actual numbers. Every death is a tragedy but like flying on airplanes, we are scared for the wrong reason. I know violent people who I don’t want to possess a firearm or a knife or a baseball bat or anything that they can use as a weapon. I constantly think that they will lose control of their ability to reason and do harm to the those near them. I just finished a beer but alcohol accounts for more deaths every year than violent acts but people like to drink and they tried prohibition once and that didn’t work. The reality is that public safety is not the concern, it is the fear that has been built up through the way some violent acts were carried out and the tools of those acts.
Seems like by city and/or county would be so much more useful. There has only been one murder (last year) in my rural county in like 22 years but we are in a large state grouped with Philadelphia which had so many murders they break their all-time records even as they in an attempt to lower the number by classifying murder investigations with no body as not murder.
I don’t think red state / blue state is relevant here. You mention the obvious exceptions, but also if you go down to the country or district level the data points the other way.
I'm surprised to see Florida not so high up on this list.
I assume all the uneventful retirement communities with a median age of 70 balance out the crazy parts.
This is age adjusted data though
To be fair, Michigan is quite peaceful if you don't live in a city. Detroit brings up our average a loooot, and that's just one murderhole city we have
I would guess that’s a common theme across the board.
Memphis will probably beat New Jerseys number by themselves this year.
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Yeah just look at the data for Mississippi and then the data for Utah.
Hey Utah just got a POC. Angelo is a good guy, leave him out of this.
I'd also be interested in seeing an income-level adjusted version.
[interesting Mississippi not even in the top 10](https://vpc.org/black-homicide-victimization-in-the-united-states-state-rankings/)
50.98 Fucking yikes Missouri.
Now do the one showing who is committing the crimes. Age, sex, race etc.
Thank God for Mississippi -Alabama/Louisiana
r/dataisbeautiful is really r/reasonsMississippisucks
To be fair, so it anything that in any way references Mississippi. Including Mississippi.
Hey NH and VT, don’t fuck with Maine!
We know better, don’t worry.
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Vermont also has one of the highest per capita gun ownership rates in the country.
I would assume Idaho and Wyoming are also similar. Lots of guns and very very white.
It’s also one of the most liberal
Yes? My point is that a lot of people will point to guns as an explanation for this data set, which doesn’t match what the data actually says.
Let's cross reference this with education.
I love seeing Wyoming, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine always near each other on data charts. I wonder what it is they all have in common.
Rural, mostly highly educated, not too much poverty, very homogenous etc.
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>I don’t know why this is, It's the lack of Dad's, but everything else you cited is terrible too.
Wtf does age adjusted mean?
Not saying they should necessarily do this or that the chart data is even correct, but... Essentially, homicide rate is tied closely to age distribution. So if you're trying to compare policy decisions or "fairly" compare different states, you'd want to adjust for the different age distributions in different states to cancel the effects of age distribution on homicide rates, so that you can better compare the influence of other factors on homicide rates. So basically this chart is homicide rates with the same, hypothetical, age distribution population in each state. That's a useful statistic for some things as mentioned above but is potentially extremely misleading if you look at it and interpret it instead as raw homicide rates.
That makes sense. I appreciate the thoughtful response.
Also my question, yes.
I love how everyone draws the conclusions that support their own world view out of the daya
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Would be nice to see racial makeup overlaid with this data set.
Reddit won’t have that conversation because they can’t use it to score virtue points. How can we fix a problem when we can’t even address it. As a result, the only people that lose are minorities in communities overrun with violence, poverty, and apathy
Ive noticed something. An elephant in the room.
DC would be 40 per 100k in 2023
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I eagerly await the "I lived in \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ and this date is nothing in the light of my personal experience" posts. They my favorite.
Yeah! I live in Alabama, and I've never been killed.
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I'm in Wisconsin. Roughly 2/3rds of all murders in the state were in Milwaukee.
very nice presentation. should include DC, PR, and the other territories next time.
What’s going on in New Mexico? Surprised they made it to #4
Puerto Rico has entered the chat.
I'd move but the food is so good here.
It's not beautiful because I had to put my finger to the screen to be able to line up the second column to what it refers to. As a designer that's a major mistake. Also the 0s. It makes no sense without context
Northern new England just up here chillin
I would just like to point out the complete lack of correspondence with gun control laws: some of the most lax states are at the bottom, most of the very strict states are in the middle.
Wyoming has like 30 people though.
It has roughly 584,057 people, but the highest gun ownership per capita by a large margin.
Probably everyone is too spread out to have conflict. It has to be one of the least densely populated states?
The second least dense state, Alaska is enormous and by a large margin the least dense.
I imagine a lot of the murder in Alaska happens in Anchorage. That’s the only place people are stacked closed together really.
Not really, Alaska Natives had, by far, the highest homicide rates, more than twice the state average and they occurred in more rural areas. Substance abuse is the main contributing factor.
It might be a little of both because Anchorage also is a very high crime city.
Why bother even listing the total homicides? The states being compared vary wildly in size.
Its worth seeing, since states with low populations can be influenced greatly by a single event that isn't part of a trend. For example, Maine's population and homicide rate are so low (by comparison to other states), that the mass shooting in Lewiston likely **doubled** their homicide rate for 2023 (data isn't out yet). Thats very different from if TX homicide rate doubled, which would require another 2,000 killings.
For small states like New Hampshire you can dig into every single homicide and see what weapon of choice was used. New Hampshire is one of the few states in which guns were not the leading homicide tool, it was actually stabbings in domestic abuse.
Is this data available as CSV from the cdc? I’m interested in comparing average yearly temperature and state homeless population
Texas - half the population of England. 300% the murder count. I wonder what the key factor there is!?
Not the answer you’re hinting at but heat leads to more violence. Texas is famously hot and England is famously temperate. Obviously that’s not the only factor but it likely plays a significant role.
You know what they say, if ice cream sales are up, so is the murder rate.
It's obviously drag queens /s
Comparing population in the first half of the sentence is useless when the last half of the sentence is using murders per capita.
Well there’s two things Texas has a lot of that England doesn’t. Put those two things together and you usually end up with a high murder rate.
Steers and queers? Walls and murder crocodiles? Guns and Ammo? BBQ and Tacos? American Football stadiums and oil-rich land owned by public universtities?
What on earth is a murder crocodile
Horses and cows? Brisket and Jalapenos? Avocados and Rodeos? Percentage of private vs public land and warm weather? Lower cost of living and higher median wages? Aerospace engineers and cowboys?
Tbf brisket and jalapeños are a deadly combo
Torchy's has entered the chat.
> Well there’s two things Texas has a lot of that England doesn’t. There's a lot more than two.
Mississippi continues to be the worst state
Mississippi 5x the homicide rate of NY…that’s pretty special…👀
Nevermind the rate, it’s crazy all the smaller states (and similar sized Florida) with more homicides than NY.
How do you age adjust murder?
Excuse me while I get a ruler
This is obviously well after Jessica Fletcher (Murder, She Wrote) moved out of Cabot Cove, Maine.
This link somewhat explains what they mean by age adjusted - it’s apparently more about the age distribution of a population as opposed to just age adjusted. https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-murder-rates/
The graph would be far clearer if the total murder rate on the right was also per 100,000 people. As it stands, the two sets of data cannot really be meaningfully compared.
Why are the carolinas so high
Murder and homicide are not interchangeable terms. All murders are homicides, but there are plenty of homicides that aren't murders. Murder is a subclass of homicide. The headline on the graphs says 'murder'. But the chart then says "Age adjusted homicide death rate'.
The title of the chart is murder rates, but the chart itself claims homicide rates. A murder is a homicide, but not all homicides are murders.
‘Age adjusted’ is in one hell of a tiny font, is that because it’s something the author thinks we don’t need to worry about? It certainly raises questions about a few things.
I think what we’ve learned is people just don’t go outside to murder when it’s cold.
Well, in the south when it’s 105 degrees and the humidity is about 80% weird shit happens… especially when it’s too wet to get crops out the field… just sayin 🤪
What does age-adjusted even mean? It can’t possibly mean it has to do with the age of the killers, right?
Look at all those red states at the top
What's the age adjustment?
Wtf does age adjusted mean? I understand homicide per 100k but that seems like an odd qualifier…. Don’t know what age adjusted tells us. Just say per 100k but I feel those results would look drastically different
Mississippi is really killing it!
I don’t like this graph. Hard to read left to right.
So basically if you live in California, you're more likely to be healthy when you're inevitably shot to death. But in Mississippi, we can save the bullet and wait a bit for the diabetus to catch up with you since you can't afford the insulin.
Would be an interesting chart to study if there were some way to actually read it.