USA: A Land of Murder and Mayhem

I watched the first episode of the British TV series Life On Mars with the girlfriend the other night, and I said British murder investigations must look different from American ones since there’s so much less murder over there. She said she thought there was plenty of murder in the UK. Then I had a moment of panic where I thought maybe I was wrong, especially since crime’s been on the rise in many Western European countries, but the US is still incredibly murderous compared to most other developed countries:

Obviously there’s an incredible amount of place-to-place variability in this, with cities like DC, Baltimore, and Detroit being much more dangerous than average and much of the country experiencing a murder rate far below average. Still, even cities that are low-murder by American standards look pretty terrible compared with our non-Poland peer nations. The dramatically lower murder rate in the United Kingdom strikes me as especially noteworthy, since they have a pretty high level of socioeconomic risk factors like inequality and single-parent households.

One moral of the story is that, as I think Mark Kleiman would tell you, one of the main benefits of having relatively few murders is that it’s easier to prevent future murders. In Washington the ratio of murder victims to investigative capacity is quite high and as a consequence it’s relatively easy to get away with murder. London can throw much more resources at any given case, which deters murder and, in turn, makes it easier to maintain the low-murder equilibrium.