Talk:List of metropolitan areas by intentional homicide

message: Hi, Sarcastic Sid. First, please allow me to congratulate you for all your work compiling these statistics. I know that it's extremely laborious to accumulate all the documentation and to condense it in a single table for comparison, especially when the terms involved are not really standardized. For example, which urban regions are considered as the same metropolitan region, the unavailability of reliable census information, and which deaths are considered intentional homicide (as you pointed out in the Totals article, sometimes even legal intervention killings are included in the statistics). This is hard work and we should thank you for doing it. So please take the following opinions only as constructive criticism.
The description of this article says that it is based on  "All homicides for the 50 worst affected zones with 100,000 or more inhabitants." Thus, you would expect that no other metro area with over 100,000 inhabitants would have a higher rate than the last one in the list. OK, here are my problems:
*It is extremely suspicious that all 50 metropolitan regions are concentrated in only six countries.
*Only four of these countries are among the six countries with highest homicide rate. (BTW, thanks for contributing to that page also, and please note that even that list is evidently incomplete: for example, Guyana is not in the list for the 2000's although it has three times higher rate than the USA.)
*Several of the countries in that list have much higher homicide rates per 100,000 inhabitants than many of the cities in this list! That would only be possible if the population in all those countries is concentrated mainly in rural areas and towns with less than 100,000 inhabitants (quite the contrary in many of those cases) and most of the homicides were occurring out of the medium and large cities (again, not the case in most of those countries).
*I know you got the statistics for the USA from a very authoritative source (the FBI). But I find it strange that they don't match at all with the ones from Morgan Quitno Press summarized (for 2005) here. (BTW, since you are clearly taking this very seriously you may want to buy the report offered in the M.Q.P. homepage). Is this due to the distinction between "city" and "metropolitan area"? Or the deaths considered "murders"? Or incomplete reporting from local authorities to the FBI?
*Your numbers for the USA seem also to clash with the ones in this page, which claim to come from the FBI (although infoplease.com is not really an authoritative source).
In any case, I guess that my issue is mainly with the description (and maybe the title) of the article, not with the data itself. If this is a work in progress, that is, as you study more countries you are "bumping off" metropolitan areas from the list to open space for the newly-found ones, the solution may be to temporarily change the description to avoid misinforming a casual observer. Thanks again. 132.192.14.232 02:50, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Is the description correct?

message: Me again! I found the homicide rates for the first few cities to be amazingly high, so I decided to take a look at the numbers. I noticed that you took the data for the first four cities (Tuluá, Buga, Palmira, Villavicencio) from this slideshow, a document from the mayor's office of Medellín, Antioquia Department (Colombia). Please notice that the relevant slide also includes extremely high rates for Bucaramanga and Pereira, which you didn't include in the table, and that the numbers don't really match what you have for Cali and, to a lesser extent, Bogotá and Medellín. I guess that you didn't include Bucaramanga and Pereira because you found conflicting information which you didn't find for the other four cities. Well, here is your conflicting information:
On the second page of this document from Colombia's Presidential Program for Human Rights, you will find the number of homicides for 2006 for several municipalities of the Valle del Cauca department, which includes three of the four cities in question. Paired with data from the 2005 census, you get these results:
Metropolitan Region  	Population	# of homicides, 2006	Rate 2006	% Change	Estimated # in 2005	Estimated rate 2005
Tuluá                	187,275   	214                 	114.27   	-9%     	235.16             	125.57
(Guadalajara de) Buga	116,893   	N/A                 	         	        	                   	
Palmira              	284,470   	226                 	79.45    	+20%    	188.33             	66.20
Buenaventura         	328,794   	408                 	124.09   	+39%    	293.53             	89.27
Cartago              	124,831   	107                 	85.72    	-32%    	157.35             	126.05
Cali                 	2,119,908 	1540                	72.64    	-3%     	1587.63            	74.89
Please note:
*There's an evident typo in the number of homicides for Cartago in the PDF I linked above.
*Buga is conspicuously missing from the PDF, suggesting that the number of homicides is less than Cartago.
*The rates for Cali are interestingly higher than the numbers you have. 
*All the cities except Cali and Buga have much lower rates than the ones cited in the Medellín's mayor slideshow. These numbers are pretty much in line with the historical numbers you have for the early 2000's, except for the sharp changes in Buenaventura and Cartago.
My point is not that you should take my data (although you might want to use the new reference), but rather to point out that the Medellín slide doesn't seem to be very reliable. And after all this I really appreciate all the effort you have done putting everything together!! Cheers! 132.192.14.232 05:36, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Suspicious source

message: I'm just working on a 90's table I'll finish it later. Thanks. Sarcastic Sid 13:12, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Work in progress 

message: Lists of 100 would be appropriate.
Sarcastic Sid 09:42, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Updating homicide lists to 100 

message: You can have a look e.g. to http://www.ocavi.com/docs_files/file_703.pdf
There the dept. of San Salvador (with 2.250.000 million people) is meant.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.200.225.99 (talk) 16:50, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  What about San Salvador (El Salvador) ?