In 2023, the homicide rate in Brazil reached 22.8 incidents per 100,000 inhabitants. The lowest number in the country since 2012 was recorded in 2021, when a homicide rate of 22.3 was recorded.

In 2024, the number of homicides in Brazil reached its lowest level of the entire period under review, with approximately 39,000 occurrences. By comparison, there were more than 60,000 homicides in the country in 2017.

Historical chart and dataset showing Brazil crime rate per 100K population by year from 1990 to 2020.

In 2024, six of the eight Brazilian cities with the highest homicide rates were in the Northeast. Feira da Santana led the ranking of the most violent city in Brazil, with a murder rate of ***** per 100,000 inhabitants. It was followed followed by Recife, with a homicide rate of more than ** per 100,000 inhabitants. In Latin America and the Caribbean, Feira da Santana was the **** most deadly city.

Brazil: Homicides per 100,000 people: The latest value from 2017 is 30.5 homicides per 100,000 people, an increase from 29.7 homicides per 100,000 people in 2016. In comparison, the world average is 7.4 homicides per 100,000 people, based on data from 97 countries. Historically, the average for Brazil from 1990 to 2017 is 23.5 homicides per 100,000 people. The minimum value, 16.8 homicides per 100,000 people, was reached in 1992 while the maximum of 30.5 homicides per 100,000 people was recorded in 2017.

The homicide rate registered in Brazil impacts ethnicities very differently. Whereas the number of homicides per 100,000 black or brown people increased by ** percent between 2006 and 2017, the homicide rate of non-black or brown individuals declined by nearly ** percent in the same period. In 2022, the homicide rate for the black ethnic group decreased compared to the previous year.

Brazil BR: Intentional Homicides: per 100,000 People data was reported at 22.384 Ratio in 2020. This records an increase from the previous number of 20.810 Ratio for 2019. Brazil BR: Intentional Homicides: per 100,000 People data is updated yearly, averaging 26.021 Ratio from Dec 1990 (Median) to 2020, with 31 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 30.593 Ratio in 2017 and a record low of 16.656 Ratio in 1992. Brazil BR: Intentional Homicides: per 100,000 People data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by World Bank. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Brazil – Table BR.World Bank.WDI: Social: Health Statistics. Intentional homicides are estimates of unlawful homicides purposely inflicted as a result of domestic disputes, interpersonal violence, violent conflicts over land resources, intergang violence over turf or control, and predatory violence and killing by armed groups. Intentional homicide does not include all intentional killing; the difference is usually in the organization of the killing. Individuals or small groups usually commit homicide, whereas killing in armed conflict is usually committed by fairly cohesive groups of up to several hundred members and is thus usually excluded.;UN Office on Drugs and Crime's International Homicide Statistics database.;Weighted average;

The average for 2017 based on 9 countries was 11.9 homicides per 100,000 people. The highest value was in Brazil: 30.5 homicides per 100,000 people and the lowest value was in Chile: 4.3 homicides per 100,000 people. The indicator is available from 1990 to 2017. Below is a chart for all countries where data are available.

In 2023, Pernambuco reported the highest homicide rate in the country, at nearly ** occurrences per 100,000 inhabitants. Pernambuco, in the country's northeastern region, ranked second, with ** homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Meanwhile, in 2021, Bahia also ranked first in numbers of homicides, with around *** thousand occurrences reported.

Abstract Violence against LGBT people has always been present in our society. Brazil is the country with the highest number of lethal crimes against LGBT people in the world. The aim of this study was to describe the characteristics of homicides of LGBT people in Brazil using spatial analysis. The LGBT homicide rate was used to facilitate the visualization of the geographical distribution of homicides. Public thoroughfares and the victim’s home were the most common places of occurrence. The most commonly used methods for killing male homosexuals and transgender people were cold weapons and firearms, respectively; however, homicides frequently involved beatings, suffocation, and other cruelties. The large majority of victims were aged between 20 and 49 years and typically white or brown. The North, Northeast and Central-West regions, precisely the regions with the lowest HDI, presented LGBT homicide rates above the national rate. LGBT homicides are typically hate crimes and constitute a serious public health problem because they affect young people, particularly transgender people. This problem needs to be addressed by the government, starting with the criminalization of homophobia and the subsequent formulation of public policies to reduce hate crimes and promote respect for diversity.

In 2022, the state of Bahia reported the largest number of homicides in Brazil. That year, ***** homicides were recorded in this northeastern state. Bahia was followed by the state of Rio de Janeiro, with ***** murders reported. Despite that, the number of homicides in Brazil reached the lowest figure that year since at least 2006, totaling ******. Homicide targets Data shows that homicides affected men disproportionaly more than women in this South American country. Considering the over ****** homicides registered in Brazil in 2022, nearly ** percent had men as victims. Again, it is important to remember the deterioration of data quality, specially in the case of femicides: there was a woman victim of violent death with no clear cause for every woman victim of homicide in Brazil. In that regard, the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso and Rondônia had the highest femicide rates. At least ***** of every 100,000 women who lived in those territories were murdered on account of their gender in 2023. Not only women, but the number of black and brown people murdered in Brazil had been growing throughout the years up until 2017, revealing that minorities are increasingly becoming the targets of violence. In 2022, nearly ****** people of color were killed in Brazil, over ***** times the number of non-black or non-brown people. Police Violence Police brutality has been gaining attention from the media, especially after George Floyd violent death in 2020. In Brazil, police violence, particularly in poor areas, such as favelas, is an old and well-known problem that affects society as a whole. Figures have shown that the number of civilians killed by police officers in Brazil surpassed ***** in both 2021 and 2022. Coincidentally, Rio de Janeiro and Bahia, the Brazilian states with the highest number of homicides, are also the ones with the highest number of people killed by the police. In Rio, the state with the second-highest figure, people of color were the main victims of deadly police interventions.

Brazil BR: Intentional Homicides: Male: per 100,000 Male data was reported at 53.128 Ratio in 2015. This records an increase from the previous number of 52.224 Ratio for 2014. Brazil BR: Intentional Homicides: Male: per 100,000 Male data is updated yearly, averaging 44.855 Ratio from Dec 2000 (Median) to 2015, with 16 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 53.128 Ratio in 2015 and a record low of 40.825 Ratio in 2010. Brazil BR: Intentional Homicides: Male: per 100,000 Male data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by World Bank. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Brazil – Table BR.World Bank: Health Statistics. Intentional homicides, male are estimates of unlawful male homicides purposely inflicted as a result of domestic disputes, interpersonal violence, violent conflicts over land resources, intergang violence over turf or control, and predatory violence and killing by armed groups. Intentional homicide does not include all intentional killing; the difference is usually in the organization of the killing. Individuals or small groups usually commit homicide, whereas killing in armed conflict is usually committed by fairly cohesive groups of up to several hundred members and is thus usually excluded.; ; UN Office on Drugs and Crime's International Homicide Statistics database.; ;

Brazil BR: Intentional Homicides: Female: per 100,000 Female data was reported at 4.441 Ratio in 2015. This records a decrease from the previous number of 4.461 Ratio for 2014. Brazil BR: Intentional Homicides: Female: per 100,000 Female data is updated yearly, averaging 3.884 Ratio from Dec 2000 (Median) to 2015, with 16 observations. The data reached an all-time high of 4.461 Ratio in 2014 and a record low of 3.649 Ratio in 2007. Brazil BR: Intentional Homicides: Female: per 100,000 Female data remains active status in CEIC and is reported by World Bank. The data is categorized under Global Database’s Brazil – Table BR.World Bank: Health Statistics. Intentional homicides, female are estimates of unlawful female homicides purposely inflicted as a result of domestic disputes, interpersonal violence, violent conflicts over land resources, intergang violence over turf or control, and predatory violence and killing by armed groups. Intentional homicide does not include all intentional killing; the difference is usually in the organization of the killing. Individuals or small groups usually commit homicide, whereas killing in armed conflict is usually committed by fairly cohesive groups of up to several hundred members and is thus usually excluded.; ; UN Office on Drugs and Crime's International Homicide Statistics database.; ;

Violence has harmful effects on individuals and society. This is especially true in Latin America, a region that stands out globally for its high homicide rate. Building on research on subnational politics, democratization, and an inter-disciplinary literature that seeks to understand sources of violence, we examine the effect of municipal politics on homicide rates in Brazil while controlling for conventional socio-structural accounts. Specifically, we test the effect of four key political variables – party identification of mayors, partisan alignment of mayors and governors, electoral competition, and voter participation – and examine the locally varying effect of these variables with geographically weighted regressions (GWR). Our emphasis on political explanations of criminal violence is a rare departure from dominant accounts of violent crime, suggesting comparisons with the literature on political violence, and the spatial approach allows an analysis of the territorially uneven effect of political variables. The results show the statistical significance, direction, and magnitude of key political factors vary substantially across Brazil’s 5562 municipalities, showcasing the uneven effect of predictors of violence across space, and generating new hypothesis regarding the conditional effect of key predictors. In the time period examined (2007–2012), the largest left party in Brazil, Workers' Party (PT), had a beneficial effect, reducing violence in large parts of Brazil, the center party that held most local governments (PMDB) had a harmful effect in certain areas of Brazil, and the largest center-right party (PSDB) had mixed effects – helpful in some parts of Brazil and harmful in others. These results help us understand key features of the relationship between Brazilian politics and public security across different parts of the country, illuminating the political geography of violence in the region's largest country.

Considering the over 46,000 homicides registered in Brazil in 2022, almost 92 percent had men as victims. Meanwhile, approximately 3,810 women were killed in the South American country that year.

Although Brazil remains severely affected by civil violence, the state of São Paulo has made significant inroads into fighting criminality. In the last decade, São Paulo has witnessed a 70% decline in homicide rates, a result that policy-makers attribute to a series of crime-reducing measures implemented by the state government. While recent academic studies seem to confirm this downward trend, no estimation of the total impact of state policies on homicide rates currently exists. The present article fills this gap by employing the synthetic control method to compare these measures against an artificial São Paulo. The results indicate a large drop in homicide rates in actual São Paulo when contrasted with the synthetic counterfactual, with about 20,000 lives saved during the period. The theoretical usefulness of the synthetic control method for public policy analysis, the role of the Primeiro Comando da Capital as a causal mediator, and the practical implications of the security measures taken by the São Paulo state government are also discussed.

Content

This dataset contain official crime statistics from São Paulo state cities (Brazil) and were prepared based on information available on the Civil State Police statistics site: http://www.ssp.sp.gov.br/Estatistica/Pesquisa.aspx

• Period available:

  • Crime Monthly Occurrences and Policy productivity: 2001 - May, 2021 Note: in both datasets, decimal separator is a point (".") .

  • Crime rates (annual rates available): 1999 -2020 (available for some of the cities) Note: in this dataset, decimal separator is a comma (",") .

• Data and labels in brazilian portuguese.

• Information about crime type interpretation (available only in brazilian portuguese) in: http://www.ssp.sp.gov.br/Estatistica/download/manual.pdf

• Datasets prepared with Selenium (webscraping) and Pandas libraries in Python.

Author: Dalciana B. Waller https://github.com/DBWALLER

In 2024, Recife was the selected metropolis with the largest number of homicides in Brazil. That year, there were ***** homicides registered in the Brazilian city of Fortaleza, ranking second in the list of selected cities. Salvador was the fourth city in Latin America and the Caribbean with the highest number of homicides.

Abstract Macrosociological theories of criminal violence predict that the rate of violent crimes, especially intentional homicide, increases in response to social structures and processes that strengthen violent motivations or weaken social controls on violence. To test these hypotheses, we used several bivariate and multivariate regression models with panel data and variables constructed with demographic and mortality data, according to theoretical relevance, to verify whether the use of psychoactive substances, access to firearms, sociodemographic structures (population growth and density and proportion of young men), and the prevalence of socioeconomic exclusion increased the rate of intentional homicides in Brazilian microregions between 1996 and 2019. Most of the results significantly support the hypotheses. But the most powerful factor was the previous year’s homicide rate. This reveals an endogenous feedback tendency of violence in the short and medium terms, which can lead to the accumulation of the effects of the structural factors of intentional homicides.

Out of every 100,000 men in Brazil, approximately ** were murdered throughout 2022, down from about ** homicides per 100,000 male inhabitants a year earlier. Meanwhile, among women in the South American country, homicide rate decreased from **** murders per 100,000 females in 2021 to **** homicides per 100,000 women in the following year.