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The chart that shows America's shocking murder rate compared to other countries

A Black Lives Matter protest on May 2, 2015 in Baltimore, Maryland
A Black Lives Matter protest on May 2, 2015 in Baltimore, Maryland

Black Americans are murdered at 12 times the rate of people in other developed countries, a shocking fact that came to light in the wake of a mass shooting in a South Carolina church in June this year.

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight crunched the data to find that on average, 5.2 out of every 100,000 American citizens were murder victims between 2010-2012.

While the median rate globally was 4.7 deaths per 100,000 people during the same period, the US's murder rate was much higher than other developed countries, as visualised by Statista in the graphic below:

Graphic: Statista

And if the rate of homicide deaths wasn't high enough in the US already, it's even worse when broken down by ethnic group.

If you factor out other races, the murder rate among white Americans is 2.4 people per 100,000, which is not substantially higher than other developed countries such as Greece (1.7 per 100,000) and Canada (1.5 per 100,000).

But for Hispanic citizens, the rate is 5.3 people per 100,000, and for non-Hispanic black citizens, the murder rate is a distressingly high 19.4 people per 100,000.

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