taal
Senior Member
Since we are talking about the world, so let's do it.
Toronto has 86 homocide cases in 2007, 70 in 2008 and 62 in 2009, averaging 73 per year. So homocide rate was about 2.92 per 100,000 people in these three years.
During the same period, European big cities:
Berlin: 1.93
Paris: 1.40
Madrid 1.14
Rome: 1.20
Vienna: 1.07
London: 1.92
Athens: 1.98
Source: Eurostat, Crime and Criminal Justice, June 2012.
In Asia, Singapore (population 5.2M)'s homocide rate is below 0.5 per 100,000. Tokyo's rate is about the same.
Hong Kong's rate is about 0.8. You will find extremely rate for others such as seoul, Taipei etc as well. They are all similar to or bigger than Toronto in size. In fact, their murder rate (under 1 per 100,000) is not even on the same scale as Toronto (between 2.5 and 3).
Toronto may be safe compared with major American cities, but it is nowhere that exceptional when put in the global context.
I honestly do not know where many people get this idea that Toronto is one of the safest cities in the world. It is simply NOT.
Those were some of the worst years in the last few decades if I recall ... and murder rates typically tend to be somewhat cyclical do to gang activity (you'll see this everywhere). Toronto has been around 50 the last few years, and what's the current estimated population, 2.7 ? Which makes the rate 1.85, in the mix above.
I'm not sure why people get caught up with the murder rate anyway, its the least important of all the statistics, you'd be much better off comparing, robberies / assaults / thefts ... that would be much more interesting.
Now in middle eastern and Asian countries, less ones caught up with civil strife / wars, I do think you'll find lower rates all around, and this is more of a cultural thing. Now at the same time you need to be careful with some of these rates (less murder ... maybe), as I'm willing to bet they are far more inaccurate in middle eastern / Asian countries ... not necessarily because of how accurately the government keeps track of these things though that can be an issue, but again its more of a cultural reason, that is I bet there are far more unreported cases throughout Asia (of rape / theft / assault / ...).
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