Fewer Murders

For the last two years Honduras has been the murder capital of the world, far outstripping any other country, but that is changing.  

This year, Venezuela will close out the year with the highest frequency in the world, with 82 murders per 100.000 population. 

Honduras, on the other hand, will show its first major reduction in homicides in the last 3 years.  According to the Observatorio de Violencia of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Honduras, Honduras will end the year with a murder rate of 67 to 69 per 100,000 population.

That, according to the Observatorio de Violencia director Migdonia Ayestas, is a reduction of 10-12 murders per 100,000 population.  In 2013 the Observatorio de Violencia reported that Honduras had a murder rate of 79 per 100,000 population.  To reduce that to 67-69 per 100,000 population is real progress.

This, however, is only a start.  The UN considers a murder rate of less than 8.8 per 100.000 population to be the goal for protecting citizens against violence.  Honduras has a long way to go to reach that.

Whose Observatory of Violence?

Who controls the crime statistics?  Honduras has an Observatorio de Violencia, long a part of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Honduras (UNAH).  The Security Ministry has outsourced its collecting and reporting of crime statistics to a private company,  Ingenieria Gerencial, owned by the Security Minister, Arturo Corrales.  Just about no one believes the crime statistics Corrales has been peddling.

So in February, Corrales announced the formation of 30 separate municipal Observatorios de Violencia, modeled after the successful program in Colombia, the  Observatorio para la Prevencion de Violencia y Lesiones de Colombia.  This program, and the existing Observatorio at UNAH, both owe their existence to pilot projects done by the CISALVA institute of the Universidad del Valle de Cali, in Colommbia 2002-2004, financed by Georgetown University and USAID.

In 1996 the Organization of American States Pan American Health Organization recognized that violence was a health problem, and in 2008 published a manual of best practices derived from what was learned in the Colombia pilot program.  The manual was written as part of a project to roll this program out in several Central American countries.  Ultimately Panama and Nicaragua were part of the initial pilot program.

Honduras was considered for that pilot program, but because of internal political considerations, was dropped.  The OAS wrote in the methodology manual for these municipal observatories in 2008:

It should be noted that Honduras was selected for the first phase [of the roll out by the UN], and later postponed for political reasons, in actuality the methodology has been successfully implemented developing a national observatory and a local observatory in the capital city of the country, founded in the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Honduras, UNAH, with the technical aid of the UN Development Program (PNUD in Spanish) and financed by the Swiss Agency for International Development.

So basically, the OAS/Pan American Health Organization is saying in 2008 that Honduras already has a national program that follows the best practices methodology they're promulgating, and doing it successfully.

So why is Arturo Corrales rejecting the Observatorio de Violencia at UNAH and proposing to supplant it with 30 municipal Observatorios doing the same work?  Corrales falsely claims you cannot do this at the national level:

The objective for establishing these municipal observatories of violencis is to characterize the causes of death and this can only be done at the local level, not the national level.

But the OAS, who after all, wrote the best practices manual, just said that the methodology was successfully being implemented at the national level in Honduras by the UNAH Observatorio de Violencia, so either Corrales is unfamiliar with the actual program and methodology, or he's being disingenous.

The irony here is that the UNAH Observatory already has proposed to do exactly this, almost a month ago.  For the last several years it has been establishing local observatories of violence in selected municipalities.  On March 27,   they announced the creation of a local observatory in Tela and said they sought to extend this to the whole country.  In fact, there already are local observatories in Comayagua, Choluteca, San Pedro Sula, Choloma, La Ceiba, and Juticalpa.  At least some of these are places Corrales intends to install his own observatories.  Maybe instead of developing a competing program, Corrales should embrace the existing one?

Why should Honduras spend money on setting up municipal violence observatories when everyone including Corrales agrees the UNAH program is exemplary? Migdona Ayestes, head of the UNAH Observatorio de Violencia, thinks it may be that Corrales doesn't understand the mission and function of an Observatorio de Violencia.  She arranged to meet with him  to explain it to him.

However, there seems to be two other  answers here.  On the one hand, these would be the "Official" observatories that would collect and disseminate statistics through the Security Ministry.  That should give everyone pause.

Corrales, though, went on to say that they would be more inclusive, involving more of civil society, and let them be able to take local preventative action and measure the results of such actions through their local statistics.  So its also about decentralization, taking the responsibility for crime fighting decision making from the Security Ministry and making responsibility for devising strategies to fight crime the responsibility of Mayors and their local observatory.

This kind of local decision making is a part of what is envisioned in the OAS best practices manual.  How that will translate in Honduras, where the police force is nationally controlled by the Security Ministry remains to be seen.
It has the benefit of taking responsibility for crime statistics away from the national government and puts it on municipalities, which Corrales must like.  Currently his job performance is evaluated by the national crime statistics, hence his investment (and profiting) from producing and reducing them.

There's no explanation for where the funding for these local observatories is coming from.  The OAS manual calls for an IT professional and a computer to host the database and map server/gis system that registers and displays crimes, and these cost money.  There is not necessarily such a person already in every municipality who can be freed up to support such a program.  The computers need to allocated, and the specified software packages installed and configured on them.  Presumably Corrales is freeing up money from some other part of his budget to cover the expenses of such a program roll out and operation.  It certainly wasn't in his 2014 budget.

So right now it looks like Honduras will have competing Observatorios de Violencia for the forseeable future.

Slight Improvement in Homicide Statistics

The Observatorio de Violencia of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Honduras (UNAH) announced over the weekend that 2013 closed out with 6,757 homicides, yielding an average of 79.7 homicides per 100,000 population or about 18.5 homicides per day. 

That's consistent with their prediction that Honduras would close out the year with a homicide rate of 80 per 100.000 population.  Its also a clear improvement over the previous year, when the homicide rate was 85 per 100,000 population.  Honduras's most violent year was 2011, when there were 92 homicides per 100,000 population.

Aruturo Corrales, the Security Minister, however, is not satisfied.

He would have you believe that Honduras improved even more.  He claims his new "official" statistics recorded a homicide rate of 75.1 per 100,000 population, or about 17 per day. 

As we have previously indicated, the problem with his "official" statistics is that he changed the definition of homicide, and the way the information is collected, so that his data cannot be compared with any previous data about the homicide rate in the country.  Corrales relies on the police to collect and evaluate the data but will not make the data publicly available for independent evaluation.  The Observatorio de Violencia, on the other hand, uses a publicly auditable set of procedures to collect and evaluate the homicide data for Honduras, and their data and procedures are available. 

It's a case of "trust me" statistics versus auditable statistics.

Corrales resents being challenged on his sleight of hand with statistics, so much so that he is threatening to create his own official Observatorio de Violencia that would be part of the Security Ministry. 

He also claims Honduras is on track to reduce the homicide rate to 30 per 100,000 population by the end of this year. That would be quite astonishing.

Like a bad statistician, Corrales keeps trying to present short-term statistics as if they represent a lasting change in homicide rates.  Accordingly, he claims the current homicide rate, over the last 37 days (!) is 14 per day.

For some reason, Corrales thinks the fact that homicides are mostly concentrated in just a few municipios (like San Pedro Sula, La Ceiba, and Tegucigalpa) makes the security situation better. True enough: but then, the majority of the population is also concentrated in those few municipios.

Migdonia Ayestas, the Director of the real Observatorio, says the state should think carefully about how it invests its scarce resources, but that even if they do create their own Observatorio de Violencia, the current one at the university will continue.

Julieta Castellanos, Rector of UNAH, added:

Corrales claims all that we do is repeat the numbers that they publish; nonetheless, the data that they process is less than the number of events registered each day and UNAH cannot publish a report that doesn't certify how the data were compiled....I think that he (Corrales) wants the number to be decreasing and we as academics cannot say what isn't true.

Ultimately success will not be measured by statistics, but by how safe the Honduran people feel.  The bad news is that regardless of the source of current homicide statistics for Honduras, it still has the highest homicide rate in the world.

How to Lie With Statistics: Honduran Homicide Edition

Arturo Corrales has cut off Honduras's Observatorio de Violencia from its ability to get crime statistics from the police and coroners in Honduras. 

Julietta Castellanos, the rector of the National Autonomous University, says that Corrales has obstructed the Observatorio from getting statistics for the last 6 months of this year.  Castellanos observed that the Observatorio:

"was created in 2003 and never have we had any restriction on access to the information; the procedures and methodology for the construction of the data were a validation process done by the University, the Public Prosecutor's office, and the Secretary of Security."

The power struggle between an administration that desperately wants to make the homicide statistics look better, and the Observatorio de Violencia, that wants to transparently report on the statistics, was made clear in October, when both the government and the Observatorio released their homicide statistics for the first half of 2013.

They differed on the number of murders by about a thousand.

At that time Corrales made the argument that it was proper to change the way Honduras reports homicides to conform to the standard way the Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo counts homicides. This procedure is particularly maladapted to the Honduran situation.  It calls for a determination of homicide only when both police and a coroner agree on a verdict of homicide.

In Honduras, few homicide victims are examined by a coroner.  Coroners only operate in the major cities (Tegucigalpa, San Pedro Sula) so for there to be a determination by a coroner, the body would have to be taken from where the individual was killed, to one of these morgues.  That simply doesn't happen, for cultural and financial reasons.  Most Hondurans reclaim the body from the police within 24 hours and bury it within 48 hours of death. The existing coroners have trouble keeping up with the volume of urban homicides. But violent death is not limited to these cities.

So requiring both a police and a coroner's report predictably would lower Honduras' reported murder rate, even though nothing has actually changed.

Porfirio Lobo Sosa claimed yesterday that

"the indices of violence have experienced a notable decline,"

and continued that he often used to hear of 20-35 deaths a day, but now it seldom breaks single digits.

That is, obviously, no justification not to make the data requested by the Observatorio de Violencia public. The reasons for obscuring it are purely political. 

The government claims homicides are down, and wants to show a big reduction.  However, the way they're now counting homicides is incompatible with the way the rate was determined in past years, so whatever they choose to announce is actually meaningless.  Numbers calculated using a new method cannot be used to establish a pattern with respect to previous homicide rates. 

As Migdonia Ayestas, head of the Observatorio de Violencia told Proceso Digital:

"we cannot play with the citizenry saying that violence has diminished when we have seen that daily there are multiple crimes."

Caritas, the Catholic charity, also issued a statement lamenting the obfuscation and calling on Corrales to cease obstructing the Observatorio's access to information.

Proceso Digital seems to agree.  It closes its article:

Ever since Arturo Corrales assumed the reins of the Secretary of Security, in one way or another they have hidden the violent death statistics from the press and the citizens in general.

Murder By The Numbers

The Lobo Sosa government and the independent Observatorio de Violencia disagree on the number of murders in Honduras in the first six months of 2013.

The difference is substantial.

The government says there have been 2,629 murders.  The Observatorio de Violencia recorded 3,547 homicides during the same period.

The difference?

The government says there isn't paperwork or bodies to substantiate 918 homicides counted by the Observatorio. The Observatorio says it has paperwork and bodies for all of them, and that it got that information from the same government sources the Minister of Security and Defense, Arturo Corrales, says don't have them.

There is an explanation.

Corrales admits that when he was appointed, he ordered a change in the methodology of the way homicides were counted, applying a new Sistema Regional de Indicadores Estandardizados de Convivencia y Seguridad Ciudadana (Standard Indicators of Living Together and Citizen Security), promulgated by the Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID).  This is a way of standardizing social statistics, including the measure of homicides, between countries to allow comparison.  This new protocol to standardize how countries report crime statistics is described in an article (linked above) published in the 2012 edition of the Revista Panamericana de Salud Publica.

So Corrales asserts that the difference in count is because the Observatorio de Violencia is not following the proper methodology.  For Corrales to count a death as murder, he requires both that there be an autopsy, and a coroner's report calling the death homicide.  Corrales says that those 918 cases are only "possible homicides" because either they lack the body, or the coroner's report declaring it a homicide.

Reality check: coroners work in, and autopsies are only performed, in Tegucigalpa, La Ceiba, and San Pedro Sula. Many families do not allow autopsies to be performed, reclaiming the body for burial almost immediately.  Thus any statistic that requires both an autopsy and coroner's report will significantly undercount homicides in Honduras.

The Observatorio de Violencia has been following internationally recognized procedures since 2004, using the same approach to accumulate data from the national police and the investigative police, as well as the coroners.

Migdonia Ayestas, the Observatorio de Violencia coordinator, said of Corrales:

If the Secretary of Security does not incorporate all the homicides attested to in his files, there is a problem with his analysis.  The police report says "dead", says by firearm, and gives a name and surname.

Of the 918 disputed cases, all have a police report; 786 of them have a cause of death indicated in the report; and only 135 lack the name of the individual.  Ayestas says there are about 400 cases where the police have not declared the death a homicide, and that the Observatorio does not count those cases.

Why is this a problem? Changing methods impedes assessing trends over time.

Corrales wants to assert that the current homicide rate in Honduras has fallen dramatically, to 70 per 100,000 population from the reported 85-91 per 100,000 in 2012.  The Observatorio de Violencia agrees that the homicide rate has fallen slightly, to about 80 per 100,000. The difference is that the Observatorio de Violencia is comparing two numbers calculated the same way; Corrales has changed the rules, so really we cannot compare the 2012 and 2013 numbers. One way the murder rate fell about 18-23%; the way the Observatorio has always used, by 6-12%.

The takeaway here is that the government is no longer following the same procedures it was following for counting murders, and therefore the numbers it gives out from now on will be incommensurate with the homicide rates it reported before. The Observatorio de Violencia is following the same procedures, so its current and past numbers will be comparable.

Or, put another way, Corrales is prepared to change the way he counts homicides so that it looks like the Lobo Sosa government is being much more effective against crime than it really is.  To do so he invented a methodology that because of how things work in Honduras, will significantly undercount the homicide rate.