Analysis of homicides occurred in Brazil in the years 2017 and 2018
Find out which Brazilian States have the largest number of homicide victims
About the authors
The authors of this article are Gustavo Bezerra and Jhonattan Cabral, both undergraduate students in Computer Science at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. This project is available in the following GitHub repository. We hope you all enjoy the study that will be presented below.
Motivation
Brazil, a heavenly place and target for tourists all around the world attracted by its natural beauty and aphrodisiac foods. However, when we talk about public safety, we know that Brazil is one of the most dangerous countries in the world, we always see in the television news reports about murders in the country. But is it really necessary to worry? Speaking of homicides, which state is the most violent in Brazil? What is the number of female victims? Moved by these questions, we decided to do a study on the number of homicides in the country. Let’s do a brief analysis and discuss about the results obtained.
About the data
The greatest difficulty encountered in designing this project occurred even before the project actually began, find a reliable database was the one that required most time. Fortunately, it was possible to find part of the data in the Brazilian Open Data Portal. It is a tool made available by the government so that everyone can find and use the data and the public information of the country. Do not think that all the information in Brazil will be contained in the site, but there is a large amount of data that can be very useful if well manipulated. To know more about the portal and the data stored click here.
As previously mentioned, we used the Brazilian Open Data Portal to find some of the data needed for this study. There, we found a total of 27 files in csv format containing information about the number of homicides in each Brazilian State from 2015 to 2018. In addition to the number of homicides, in most of the files there were other information such as date and sex of crime victims. Only 5 files did not follow the same pattern presented by the other 22, e.g. they had no information about the sex of the victims. These files refer to the states of Alagoas, Goiás, Maranhão, Mato Grosso, and Tocantins. This has become a problem only in the female victims analysis, which will be more detailed below. Although the data is stored in the portal already informed, the information was extracted from the SinespJC and Sinesp Integration solutions on March 14, 2019.
It was necessary to find information about the Brazilian population. Such information was found by accessing the website of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics — IBGE. Population data were extracted in the year 2018. These data were essential to carry out a comparison between the number of homicide victims and the population of each State. Although we made the analysis of the homicides also of 2017; we used the data referring to the population of 2018 because they are more recent if compared to the last IBGE research. It was also necessary to find data referring to latitude and longitude of each state, this was important for the elaboration of the maps shown below. The geographic data used was extracted from Google Maps.
In addition, the entire study was performed using the Python programming language. It was also used some libraries that were of extreme importance, such as: Numpy and Pandas for the manipulation of the data, Seaborn and Matplotlib for the construction of the chart, and for the elaboration of the maps were used the library Folium and Kepler that is a powerful open source geospatial analysis tool.
Homicides in Brazil
In Brazil, willful murder is when a person intentionally kills another. This type of homicide can be classified as direct, i.e. when the individual really wants to kill another person; or indirect, when the individual does not intend to kill, but is responsible for organizing some event that causes the death of someone as a consequence. According to The New York Times, most homicides occurred in urban centers, particularly in the north and northeast of the country.
For he year of 2017, the following map was obtained.
Rio de Janeiro is often on the news due to violence problems. Notwithstanding, it appears as one of the most violent states in the year. Unexpectedly, however, the Bahia state had the largest number of homicides throughout 2017. In addition, the states of Ceará and Pernambuco also had a large number of homicides. This scenario raises a curious hypothesis to be analysed in future studies — does the 2016 Alcaçuz Jailbreak have any influence on Ceará and Pernambuco? It is possible that some fugitives escaped to states close to Rio Grande do Norte. It is also interesting to note that most states with lower homicides occurrences are not littoral states. The reason may be historical, since the first Brazilian cities to foster were littoral cities. Notwithstanding, most of the capitals are littoral cities.
The following map was generated for the year of 2018 data.
It is important to note that the minimum and maximum values of homicides changed. Otherwise, the inattentive reader may have concluded that the number of homicides in the State of Pará have dramatically increased; which is not the case. Most of the conclusions from the 2017 map are still applicable for the 2018 map. Note, however, that the number of homicides in Bahia have decreased, falling into the same category as Rio de Janeiro. The number of homicides in Minas Gerais has also decreased.
The number of homicides for each year, alongside the population is reported in the following Figure. The x-axis represent the Brazilian States. Each State has two bars associated to it — the first corresponds to the number of homicides in 2017, while the second corresponds to the number of homicides in 2018. The left y-axis illustrates the number of homicides. The number of inhabitants in a State is represented by the dots in the red line. The population is scaled in millions of inhabitants (right y-axis).
As expected, States with larger population are more likely to have more homicides. Note, however, that the population is not the determinant factor homicides. For instance, The State of São Paulo (SP)has the largest population, but it had less homicides than Bahia (BA), Ceará (CE), Pará (PA), Pernambuco (PE), and Rio de Janeiro (RJ) in both years. The most violent State is Bahia (BA), followed by Rio de Janeiro (RJ). Note that this information matches the map; even though both states were classified as equally violent in the 2018 map. It is interesting to note that, proportionally, the State of São Paulo (SP) is the less violent. However, it is possible to conclude that HERE.This plot also highlights that the number of homicides in both Pernambuco (PE) and Rio Grande do Sul (RS) have dramatically decreased.
However, the most interesting information inferable is that the total number of homicides in Brazil decreased from 2017 to 2018. Specifically, 56,249 in 2017 compared to 49,071 in 2018 — approximately 12.76% less homicides. The only States were the number of homicides increased or matched the 2017 data are Acre (AC), Distrito Federal (DF), and Tocantins (TO). This information contradicts a common belief in Brazil that the country is constantly growing more violent.
Women victims
As previously stated, the data used for this study did not contain information about women victims for the following States: Alagoas, Goiás, Maranhão, Mato Grosso, and Tocatins. The following map contains data about women homicides in 2017.
Unsurprisingly, the States that had the largest number of homicides also had large numbers of women homicides — Bahia, Ceará, Pernambuco, and Rio de Janeiro. Note, however, that this is not the top four violent State for women. The States in the corresponding top four are Bahia, Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo, which had from 380 to 511 victims. The total number of women homicides in Brazil during 2017 was 3,937.
The following map corresponds to the number of homicides against women in 2018.
This map is similar to the 2017 map. Therefore, it is possible to conclude that the proportion of homicides did not change. In other words, the ranking is similar, e.g. Bahia, Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo are the most violent States for women. Even so, the total number of homicides still decreased, 3,555 in total. This value represents approximately 9.7% less women homicides in 2018 than in 2017.
Conclusion
It is important to gather data and provide them publicly, in order to support similar analyses in different topics. In this study, it is possible to conclude that there was an overall decrease in the number of homicides — 12.76% total, and 9.7% women homicides.
For future works, it is interesting to repeat this analysis for the coming years; in order to properly infer conclusions for a temporal analysis. In addition, it would also be interesting to compare the obtained results with data from other countries. For instance, compare the homicides between countries with similar Human Development Indexes.
