Crime & Safety

Baltimore on List of World's 50 Cities with Most Homicides

Where do Baltimore and a handful of other U.S. cities rank on a list of the world's most violent places?

Baltimore -- despite some success in getting guns off the streets -- has made a dubious Top 50 list.

Charm City has ranked No. 41 on the list of 50 Most Violent Cities in the World with 35.03 homicides per 100,000 residents, reportsBusiness Insider. The total homicide count in Baltimore in 2012 was 219.

Forty-one out of the top 50 dangerous cities are located in Latin America, which is plagued with drug trafficking, gang wars, political instability, corruption and poverty, the website site says. U.S. cities that also made the list include New Orleans at 17th, along with Detroit at No. 20, St. Louis at 40th, and Oakland at No. 43.

But many other U.S. cities have reported more homicides than Baltimore, says the Huffington Post in a Nov. 7 story when the city marked its 200th homicide of the year. There have been 216 homicides in Baltimore to date, according to a Baltimore Sun database.

As of Nov. 1, 354 people had been murdered in Chicago -- which the Sun-Times notes is the city's lowest murder total since 1965. New York, too, has seen fewer homicides in 2013 than in previous years -- 279, as of Oct. 31. But New York's population is significantly higher than Baltimore's -- more than 8 million as compared to under 650,000. Chicago's population, as of the 2013 Census, is also much higher then Baltimore's -- over 2.7 million.

Detroit, meantime, has a population closer in size to Baltimore's, of just over 700,000 at the time of the last Census. As of early August, which is when the Detroit police last updated their website, there had been 197 reported homicides. That number has gone up significantly in the last week alone, nearing 300 homicides, the Huffington Post says.

According to the Sun, Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts "expressed disappointment" with the number of homicides in Baltimore in 2013, "though he stressed that the numbers of all other major crimes have gone down."

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The department claims to have taken 1,800 illegal guns off the streets this year, says the Baltimore City Paper.

Worldwide, the highest murder rate of all is in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, with 169 homicides per 100,000 people, according to a study published earlier this year by Mexico's Citizens' Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice. The ranking is based on 2012 data.

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