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Despite San Antonio's rising homicide rate, the Alamo City still had less murders than some other large U.S. cities, including Denver, Dallas and Minneapolis.
A recent report by Latinometrics, a Substack blog published by leading experts on Latin American affairs, found that several large Latin American cities often associated with violent crime, including Mexico City, now have lower homicide rates than San Antonio and other U.S. metros.
"[Mexico] undoubtedly has a crime problem — five of the 10 most dangerous cities this year are in our country," Karla Berman, a Mexico-based expert in Latin American affairs and member of the Latin American Advisory Board at Harvard Business School, said in the report. "But Mexico City, which often has a bad reputation in terms of crime, has been dropping its homicide rate since 2018."(1/11) São Paulo cut its homicide rate by 90% and is now about as safe as Boston. Mexico City is currently safer than Dallas and Denver.
— Latinometrics 📊 (@LatamData) December 9, 2022
A thread on LatAm's (not so) dangerous cities, by @karlaberman 🌆: pic.twitter.com/UJT627sITA
In contrast, San Antonio's homicide rate has steadily risen since 2020, as previously reported by the Express-News. City officials have not yet released San Antonio's official homicide rate for 2022, but its data for the first nine months of the year includes the deaths of 54 migrants who perished in an abandoned tractor trailer, which partially explains the year's spike.
Using data from Bloomberg's Homicide Monitor, which describes itself as the "most comprehensive publicly available data set on murder in the world," Berman found that other large Latin American cities, including Sao Paulo, Brazil; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Santiago, Chile also had lower homicide rates than San Antonio.
In the early 2000s, Sao Paulo's murder rate was 10 times higher than it is now. The city's police reform policies and increasingly strict gun regulation have helped it slash its number of homicides since then, according to the report.
In 2023, with the help of UTSA, San Antonio will implement a new approach to crime prevention via "hot-spot" policing. The plan aims to increase police visibility and use "intelligence-led offender targeting" to address crime, according to the Express-News,
San Antonio's violent crime continues to grab national headlines, most recently with December's seemingly random drive-by shooting of woman on I-10. Even so, the Alamo City is still safer than many large U.S. metros.
Denver, Dallas, Minneapolis, Las Vegas and Philadelphia all had higher homicide rates per 100,000 people than San Antonio, according to Latinometrics' report.
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