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I would also like to see those states ranked by how much of each state's population lives in a city of greater than 100,000 persons. My hypothesis is that states where a higher percentage of the population lives in "larger" cities would have a lower murder rate. Additionally, cities where a large percentage of the population is un/der/employed and/or near the poverty line might also be expected to have higher murder rates and have a higher crime rate overall as well.
For instance, Texas is a southern state but does not have as high a murder rate per 100,000 population as other Southern states. One differentiator is that Texas probably has a higher proportion of its population living in its larger cities.
These are not the true "murder-rate". The are the rate of deaths that are officially recognized as homicides. There is no way to know \how many homicides are listed as accidental, suicide, or simply missing persons. The number of homicides that are not recognized could be maybe more, maybe twice as many, maybe ten times as many, nlbody can ever know.
One nteresting factoid is that about 40% of all known homicides are never solved. This figure can be ascertained by the Justice Department's statistic on "relationship of victim to perpetrator", which in 40% of cases is categorized as "unknown". The only way that can be unknown is if the identity of the perp is unknown.
Not necessarily, such as if any of the states don't track that information. (Hopefully, DoJ doesn't tag "missing" data as "unknown".) There is a good bit of noncomparable data gathered by the states about crimes.
Last edited by ParkTwain; 10-28-2008 at 02:19 PM..