Homicide Monitor: The World's Lethal Violence, Mapped Country by Country

Homicide Monitor takes one of the grimmest numbers a society produces and puts it on a map you can actually read. Rates per 100,000 people, country by country, city by city, split by gender, age band and whether a gun was involved. It is a research instrument that happens to be usable by anyone with a browser.

What is the Homicide Monitor?

It is built and maintained by the Igarapé Institute, a Brazilian think tank working on security, development and climate policy. Brazil is a reasonable place for a project like this to originate: the country accounts for a substantial share of the world’s homicides, and the institute’s work on violence reduction needed a data layer that did not exist in accessible form.

The map itself is the front door. Countries are shaded by homicide rate, and clicking one opens a panel with the count, the rate per 100,000, and the breakdowns. For many countries there is a second layer of city-level data, which is where the picture changes most sharply, because national averages hide enormous internal variation. A country with a moderate national rate can contain individual cities at ten times that level.

The disaggregation is the site’s real contribution. Total homicide numbers are almost useless for policy. Knowing what share of victims are men aged 15 to 29, what share of killings involve firearms, and how female victimization compares tells you something about which interventions might plausibly work. The monitor exposes all of that in a couple of clicks.

It is honest about its limits, which matters here more than in most datasets. Countries define homicide differently, record it with wildly different levels of completeness, and report on different schedules. Some figures come from public health mortality statistics, some from criminal justice systems, and the two rarely agree. The site documents sources and reporting years rather than smoothing everything into false precision.

The dataset is downloadable, which means this is not just a visualization but a source. Journalists and researchers use it as a starting point precisely because assembling the equivalent from scratch would take months.

What can you do with the Homicide Monitor?

• Explore the global map. Countries shaded by rate, with the reference year shown so you know what you are comparing.
• Drill into a country. Get the count, the rate per 100,000, and the demographic and firearm breakdowns in one panel.
• Compare cities. City-level data reveals that violence concentrates far more sharply than national figures suggest.
• Filter by gender and age. The age and sex distribution of victims is one of the most policy-relevant cuts available.
• Check firearm involvement. The share of homicides committed with guns varies dramatically between countries with similar overall rates.
• Download the dataset. The compiled data is published for reuse, with sourcing documented.
• Read the sourcing notes. Every figure carries provenance, which is the difference between a chart and evidence.

Tips to get the most out of it

Always use rate, not count. Raw totals mostly measure population. The per-100,000 rate is the only number that lets you compare a small country with a large one without saying something silly.

Check the reference year on every figure. Countries report at very different lags. Two shaded neighbors on the same map may be showing data from years apart, and comparing them directly is a mistake the map itself will not stop you from making.

Go to city level before drawing conclusions. National averages are the least informative number on the site. Violence clusters, and the city view is where that becomes visible.

Read the methodology page once. Public health mortality data and police crime data measure overlapping but different things. Knowing which source a figure came from changes how much weight it can carry.

Use the download if you are doing real work. Screenshotting the map is fine for illustration, but if a number is going into an article or a paper, take the dataset and cite the institute properly.

Pair it with local sources. Global datasets are necessarily coarse. For any specific place, a national statistics office or a dedicated local tracker will be more current and more granular.

If you like Homicide Monitor, also try…

• HeyJackass: the same subject at the scale of a single city, tracked relentlessly and unofficially.
• Our World in Data: long-run global indicators with the sourcing shown, on almost every topic imaginable.
• Gapminder: the tool that taught a generation to read country-level statistics without their prejudices intact.
• Liveuamap: conflict and security events plotted as they happen rather than compiled after the fact.

More sobering, carefully sourced datasets in Data & Research, and more things worth mapping in Maps & Exploration.