Fact-check: Is this widely-shared ranking of the ‘world’s most dangerous cities’ accurate?

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Social media posts claiming to list the world’s most dangerous cities have been widely shared online. South African users have questioned the validity of the list, which placed the small city of Pietermaritzburg in second place in the global ranking, along with five more South Africans in the top 20. “Crime indexes” are based entirely on online surveys of how safe people feel — not objective data.

A Facebook post, which we’ve archived here, shows the top 20 cities on the list with a headline that reads: “Visit the top scoring SA cities on crime statistics 2019. Who Would have thought PMB aka Sleepy Hollow was the second most dangerous city in the world oh my…” This post has been shared 1800 times.

More versions of the same post can be found here and have been shared hundreds of times on Facebook.

Some social media users sarcastically congratulated South Africa for placing six cities in the top 20, while others questioned the possibility of Pietermaritzburg, an eastern city of around 200,000 residents, being the second most dangerous city in the world.

An Internet search of “world’s most dangerous city numbeo.com” — the website address seen at the top of the screenshot — shows that the statistics are taken from Numbeo, a website that bills itself as “the world of consumerism.” The largest database of Contributed data about cities and countries around the world.”

A Crime Index level of less than 20 on Numbio is considered very low, and a crime level of over 80 is considered very high.

However, the website also states that its crime indexes are “based on surveys of visitors to this website”, using survey questions that it considers “similar to many scientific and government surveys”.

AFP Fact Check in Johannesburg launched a review of Pietermaritzburg to see the type of questions asked. They are all subjective, asking people to rate on a scale of 1-5 how worried they are about certain issues.

There are a few reasons to take this data with a pinch of salt.

First, survey data are based on participants’ perceptions of risks, real or imagined—it is possible that respondents in different locations have different perceptions of what constitutes “very safe” or “very unsafe.” “What is

Second, a person doesn’t have to set foot in a city to appreciate how dangerous it is—in essence, anyone can review any city on Nambio.

Pietermaritzburg briefly claimed the top spot in the rankings in 2014, but has mostly been in second place since mid-2015, the website shows. However, in 2018, the city dropped completely down the rankings.

“This data is based on feedback from visitors to this website over the past 3 years,” reads a disclaimer.

Only 74 people have reviewed the city – compared to 353 people who contributed to Caracas, Venezuela’s position as the most dangerous city in the world.

If the posts had said that Pietermaritzburg was rated the second most dangerous city in the world by the more than 70,000 people who filled out Numbeo’s survey, they would have been correct.

South African official crime statistics

According to the latest South African crime statistics released for the period April 2018 to March 2019, the highest number of crime reports The center is Cape Town Central in the Western Cape Province.

As reported by AFP, South African troops have been patrolling Cape Town’s crime-ridden townships since July after being deployed by the government to combat rising incidents of shootings, gang violence and murders. have been

Although crime is high in Pietermaritzburg, the city does not make the list of the 10 worst areas for murder in South Africa, let alone the world. All 10 positions are occupied by cities in the Western Cape province.

As noted in this local news article published on September 13, the latest crime statistics show that Plessislaer, a southwestern suburb of Pietermaritzburg, has seen a recent increase in homicides. Figures show that the number of murders in the Plessaler area rose to 166 between April 2018 and March 2019, up from 104 last year.

However, a review of reported crime in Pietermaritzburg shows a slight but steady decline over the past five years.

Comparing homicide rates offers a more widely accepted and objective way to measure how dangerous countries or cities are — though it relies heavily on the assumption that the data from each location is the same. Figures are accurate and up to date.

This World Atlas report ranked the world’s most dangerous cities “based on homicides per capita,” ranking Los Cabos, Mexico as the world’s most dangerous city with murders per 100,000 people. The rate is 111.33.

Caracas, Venezuela is second with a homicide rate of 111.19, and South Africa’s first city is 15th with a rate of 62.25 — Cape Town.

An average of 58 people were killed every day in South Africa last year, police said last month. The country is seeking expert help to understand why many of these murders are carried out by friends and relatives — see this AFP report.

A total of 21,022 people were killed in the country between April 2018 and March 2019, which is 1.4 percent more than the same months between 2017 and 2018.