{"id":53035,"date":"2012-12-17T12:00:36","date_gmt":"2012-12-17T17:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=53035"},"modified":"2012-12-15T20:02:41","modified_gmt":"2012-12-16T01:02:41","slug":"assault-deaths-within-the-united-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/12\/17\/assault-deaths-within-the-united-states\/","title":{"rendered":"Assault Deaths Within the United States"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at\u00a0Kieran Healy’s blog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

The chart in\u00a0\u201cAmerica is a Violent Country\u201d<\/a>\u00a0has been getting a lot of circulation. Time to follow up with some more data. As\u00a0several commentators at CT noted<\/a>, the death rate from assault in the U.S. is not uniform within the country. Unfortunately, state-level and county-level mortality data are not easily available for the time period covered by the previous post \u2014 though they do exist, going back to the 1940s. What I have to hand is a decade\u2019s worth of US mortality data courtesy of\u00a0CDC WONDER<\/a>covering 1999 to 2009. I extracted the assault deaths according to the same criteria the OECD uses (for the time period in question, ICD-10 codes X85-Y09 and Y87.1). The estimates are adjusted to the 2000 U.S. population, which isn\u2019t identical to the standard OECD adjustment. But the basic comparability should be OK, for our purposes.<\/p>\n

First, it\u2019s well-known that there are strong regional differences in the assault death rate in the U.S. by state and region. Here\u2019s what the patterns look like by state from 1999 to 2009\u00a0(click for a larger\u00a0PNG<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0PDF<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This figure excludes the District of Columbia, which has a much higher death rate but is also a city. Also missing are a few states with small populations and low absolute numbers of assault deaths \u2014 Wyoming, North Dakota, Vermont \u2014 such that the CDC can\u2019t generate reliable age-adjusted estimates for them. If you want a \u201csmall-multiple\u201d view with each state shown separately from high to low,\u00a0here you go<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The legend for the figure above arranges the states from high to low, reading top to bottom and left to right. Although it\u2019s clear that geographical region isn\u2019t everything, those tendencies are immediately apparent. Let\u2019s look at them using the official census regions\u00a0(click for a larger\u00a0PNG<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0PDF<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As is well known, the South is more violent than the rest of the country, by some distance. Given\u00a0the earlier post<\/a>, the natural thing to do is to put these regional trends into the cross-national comparison and see \u2014 for the decade we have, anyway \u2014 how these large U.S. regions would fare if they were OECD countries. Again, bear in mind that the age-adjustment is not quite comparable\u00a0(click for a larger\u00a0PNG<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0PDF<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Despite their large differences, all of the U.S. regions have higher average rates of death from assault than any of the 24 OECD countries we looked at previously. The placid Northeast comes relatively close to the upper end of the most violent countries in our OECD group.<\/p>\n

Finally, there\u2019s the question of racial and ethic incidence of these deaths within the United States. Here are the decade\u2019s trends broken out by the race of the victim, rather than by state or region\u00a0(click for a larger\u00a0PNG<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0PDF<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The story here is depressing. Blacks die from assault at more than three times the U.S. average, and between ten and twenty times OECD rates. In the 2000s the average rate of death from assault in the U.S. was about 5.7 per 100,000 but for whites it was 3.6 and for blacks it was over 20. Even 3.6 per 100,000 is still well above the OECD-24 average, which \u2013 if we exclude the U.S. \u2013 was about 1.1 deaths per 100,000 during the 2000s, with a\u00a0maximum<\/em>\u00a0value of 2.9. An average value of 20 is just astronomical. And this is after a long period of decline in the death rate from assault.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014—<\/p>\n

Kieran Healy is a professor of sociology in the\u00a0Kenan Institute for Ethics<\/a>\u00a0at Duke University. \u00a0His research is primary concerned with the moral order of a market society. You can follow him on\u00a0twitter<\/a>\u00a0and at his\u00a0blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at\u00a0Kieran Healy’s blog. The chart in\u00a0\u201cAmerica is a Violent Country\u201d\u00a0has been getting a lot of circulation. Time to follow up with some more data. As\u00a0several commentators at CT noted, the death rate from assault in the U.S. is not uniform within the country. Unfortunately, state-level and county-level mortality data are not easily available for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2056,233,260,3920,250,285,1758,1759,1760,1757,133],"class_list":["post-53035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crimelaw","tag-death","tag-international-comparisons","tag-nation-united-states","tag-guns","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-american-indiansaboriginals","tag-raceethnicity-asianspacific-islanders","tag-raceethnicity-blacksafricans","tag-raceethnicity-whiteseuropeans","tag-violence"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53035"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53045,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53035\/revisions\/53045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}