Iraq and the US: ‘Violent Death’ Stats That Will Iraq Your World

SEE GRAPH AT UPDATE 2.

This post is staying at the top for the rest of Wednesday because of the importance of the topic.

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The Associated Press released an interesting set of stats (host link stored for future ref) a couple of days ago that I would suppose were designed to suck away any optimism any fools who still support the mission in Iraq might have (bolds are mine):

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Government officials on Monday reported that 16,273 Iraqi civilians, soldiers and police died violent deaths in 2006, a figure larger than an independent Associated Press count for the year by more than 2,500.

The tabulation by the Iraqi ministries of Health, Defense and Interior, showed that 14,298 civilians, 1,348 police and 627 soldiers were killed in the violence that raged in the country last year.

The Associated Press accounting, gleaned from daily news reports from Baghdad, arrived at a total of 13,738 deaths.

Pretty grim, isn’t it? And this is for “violence that raged in the (whole) country.”

(Aside: Yes, I know I didn’t excerpt the last paragraph about the UN claiming that “100 die each day.” Give me a break — The UN is winging it with no support. And besides, I thought AP, despite Jamil “Captain Tuttle” Hussein, is the gold standard in reporting. Dear reader, you wouldn’t be getting cold feet about AP, would you?)

Man, what a downer. I mean, this is an honest-to-goodness Grade A bona fide quagmire.

So, to reinforce the “obvious” assumption that we simply have to get out now (or at least “redeploy” to, I don’t know, maybe Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, or something), I decided it would useful to deepen my depression about the fate of the hopelessly lost Iraqi people while making myself feel better about how much safer folks are and have been here in the USA. So I started digging into US murder statistics.

Oops — What I found made me less depressed about Iraq, and more concerned about the US. I even began to wonder why the police in some of our larger cities in the fairly recent past didn’t decide to redeploy to, I don’t know, maybe Mississauga, Ontario, or something. In a couple of the more current cases, I’m half-surprised that the cops haven’t retreated to, I don’t know, Medicine Hat, Alberta, or something.

Anyhow, let’s put this in perspective. Below are 10 listings for US cities and years. Your mission to accomplish (so to speak), is to guess whether each particular city’s murder rate in the year identified was higher or lower than 2006’s “violent death rate” in Iraq (which is, from all appearances, all-inclusive; linked proof to the contrary is welcome –however, Taranto’s Best of the Web from last year that worked with different numbers, a different source, and a different time period doesn’t count). Let’s use the Iraqi government’s higher number of 16,273 just for the heck of it, even though the Associated Press will “surely” be bothered that I’m exaggerating the level of violence compared to what their records show (somehow, I think they’ll get over it). Using the government’s figure means that Iraq’s violent death rate in 2006 was 56.49 per 100,000 residents (16,273 deaths, and a population per Wiki of 28,807,000).

So here are the US cities and the related years:

1. New York City - 1990
2. Washington, DC - 1991
3. Gary, IN - 2005
4. Detroit, MI - 1991
5. Compton, CA - 2005
6. New Orleans, LA - 2006
7. New Orleans, LA - 2004
8. New Orleans, LA - 2003
9. Atlanta, GA - 1973
10. E. St. Louis, IL - 2004

If you’re on the home page, click “more” when you’ve made your guesses (if not, no fair peeking ahead!).

Scroll down when you’re done.

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Done?

SURPRISE — Every city and year listed had a higher murder rate than Iraq in 2006 — except (surprise again) New York City in 1990 (Gotham’s worst year on record for murder).

The murder rates were as follows:

1. New York City - 1990; 30.7 (2,245 murders; population 7,322,000)
2. Washington, DC - 1991; 83.1 (482 murders; population 598,000 [1])
3. Gary, IN - 2005; 58.0
4. Detroit, MI - 1991; roughly 60
5. Compton, CA - 2005; 67.1
6. New Orleans, LA - 2006; 67.5 (154 murders; population 228,000 [2])
7. New Orleans, LA - 2004; 59.6 (275 murders; population 461,115 [3])
8. New Orleans, LA - 2003; 57.7
9. Atlanta, GA - 1973; 57.7 (271 murders; population 470,000 [1])
10. E. St. Louis, IL - 2004; 63.4

Does this mean Iraq is a walk in the park? Of course not.

Does this mean that Iraq is a hopeless quagmire that cannot be won? It would appear, at a minimum, that anyone who believes that carries a heavy burden of proof.

And to personalize it, dear reader, unless you’ve gone on record in favor of abandoning the residents of the cities listed above to their own devices at the times they were (or are) extremely dangerous places to be, it would seem that you have no basis for contending that we should do that to the people of Iraq.

Notes:
[1] - interpolated between reported decade-ending populations.
[2] - USAT article reports that New Orleans population is “about half of its pre-Katrina population of 455,000.”
[3] - Population per US Census Bureau downloadable spreadsheet found at this link.

Cross-posted, with some revisions, at NewsBusters.org.
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UPDATE: Oh, you say that the deaths are concentrated in just a few areas in Iraq? Fine. That sounds like a concession that the large majority of the country is very safe (which is indeed the case), just as in most of the cities above, a majority of the neighborhoods are, with a couple of exceptions, considered safe.

So ….. what’s your point again?

UPDATE 2: Here are the results shown graphically, with the AP’s lower Iraq death rate of 47.7 per 100,000 thrown in for good measure –

UPDATE 3: I’m carrying in this comment I made at NewsBusters with minor modifications for the hard of comprehension, i.e., the don’t-get-its, the won’t-get-its, and won’t-admit-its:

If you want an area with a lot of people for comparison, use all of NYC, which in 1990 had about 25% as many people as the entire country of Iraq (7.2 mil v. 28.8 mil). Big enough numbers, right?

NYC’s murder rate was just over half of Iraq’s “violent death” rate, which as indicated above, may include things besides murder, but I’ll ignore that.

Iraq is in a war and it is AS A WHOLE only a little less than twice as dangerous as ALL of NYC was in 1990.

If you want to start playing the smaller area game, and claim that Baghdad has some awful neighborhoods, as I’m sure it does, you’re going to have to acknowledge that NYC in 1990 had very safe areas like Staten Island and Lower Manhattan, but some nightmarish sections in the Bronx and Harlem that could easily have had murder rates rates pushing 100 per 100,000.

Yet “somehow” NYC got brought under control, even without soldiers. I fail to see why we and of course the Iraqi soldiers and police and govt. can’t finish getting Iraq under control. And I fail to see how the violence can be perceived as out of control and unmanageable — otherwise you’ll have to concede that some of the cities above were or are out of control and unmanageable.

I don’t know how much clearer one can be.

In fact, given how the numbers are working, if the war’s opponents were smart, they’d say “see, it IS relatively safe, we’ve done our job, let’s come home.” But they’re not that smart.

UPDATE 4: In this later report (also saved to host), the official count seems to have come down very close to AP’s:

In the third full year since the U.S.-led invasion, only about half as many Iraqi soldiers died in 2006 as American troops, the government reported.

But the number of Iraqi security forces killed jumped to 1,539 — nearly double the American death count of 823 for the year — when the deaths of police, who conduct paramilitary operations, are added to the number of slain Iraqi soldiers.

The civilian toll of 12,357 coupled with the security force deaths bring the overall figure reported by the ministries of Health, Defense and Interior to 13,896 — 162 more than the tally kept by The Associated Press.

The AP count, assembled from its daily news reports, was always believed to be substantially lower than the actual number of deaths because the news cooperative does not have daily access to official accounting by the Iraqi ministries. Many deaths were thought to have gone unreported by AP.

Though it might be defensible, I’m not going to change any of the numbers above — only note that if AP is wrong about unreported deaths, then there would be a lot more US cities, both last year and in recent prior years, that had murder rates above AP’s roughly 48 per 100,000 (before considering “unreporteds”).

UPDATE 5: Thanks to Conservative Grapevine and Anchoress for the links.

UPDATE 6: Commenter #3 David pointed out that New Orleans in the early 1990s was actually a bit more dangerous than Washington DC in 1991. That was definitely the case in 1994:

Homicides hit their historic peak in the city in 1994, with 421 dead — more per-capita than any other U.S. city that year. Within just five years, the number was slashed by nearly two-thirds, to 159, as homicides plummeted nationally.

New Orleans’ population in 1994 was roughly 492,000 from interpolating between the Wiki numbers for 1990 and 2000. That would put 1994’s murder rate in the Big Easy at a breathtaking 85.57 per 100,000 — exactly what David thought was the peak.

UPDATE 7, Jan. 6: Midnight Blue — “Can We Call Philadelphia a Quagmire?” — and the City of Brotherly Love’s murder rate is slightly lower than NYC in 1990.