WS MoreOrLess: Caps off to Rooney
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.
Hello, welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Wesley Stevenson. There's been shock and outrage about reports that 43 students in Mexico have gone missing and are presumed to have been murdered. And it was a statistic in a story about the students' disappearance that's led one of our listeners, Trent Hewton, to contact us. An article on the Huffington Post website said that roughly 98% of murders in Mexico were unsolved. At first glance, that might seem like an incredibly high number. Can it be true? Our reporter Keith Moore has been investigating.
So, Keith, what have you found out? The first thing to mention is Mexico's murder rate of 21.5 murders per 100,000 people. That's much higher than the US at 4.7 per 100,000 and also every country in Europe. However, it is still behind 20 other countries and way behind Honduras, which has a murder rate of 90 per 100,000. I spoke to Carlos Villalta, who is a visiting fellow at the Center for U.S. Mexican Studies in the University of California in San Diego. And he told me that when a murder suspect had been arrested and was in court, the chance they would actually go to jail was very high.
From 1997 to 2011, we have about a 90% conviction rate. So if you get arrested for a homicide crime, there's a chance of 9 in 10 to actually be convicted. The problem here is how many of them get arrested.
OK, so the chances of conviction are high if a murder suspect is actually arrested and charged and then put in front of a court. But what about the question of whether 98% of murders in Mexico are unsold?
Well, according to statistics released by Mexico's National Institute of Statistics, that is in fact correct. They formulate the rate by combining two sets of figures – Judicial statistics for the number of people who have been convicted of murder and health statistics for the number of people that have died a violent death which have then been confirmed by a doctor as homicide.
What is the missing students story and the 98% unsolved murders claim in Mexico?
It is really rare to find a murderer being arrested in the end and being in jail for a homicide crime is just 2% chance, which is statistically significant. What you have is basically a statistical anomaly. When you look historically at the trend, you see that these variations... Around 98% are pretty much constant historical pattern of state failure.
Carlos Villalta said he doesn't think Mexico's rate for unsolved murders would be very different from other countries in Central and South America. However, there's little data to back this up.
It's astonishingly low, isn't it? I mean, the one question I imagine everyone is asking now is why are so few homicides in Mexico sold?
Well, that was the question I asked Stephen Dudley, the co-director of Insight Crime, which is an investigative think tank based in the US and Colombia.
The number one factor is that the institutions there, specifically these judicial institutions, simply don't work. They have this incredible way of either bungling up investigations, not actually doing investigations, being influenced by those who are being investigated, either threatened or co-opted in some way, or perhaps even paid off in some way. So there's an incredibly high inefficiency. But of course, that then bleeds into other types of reasons that would be obvious offshoots from this, which is that people don't trust these institutions. People will not go to the authorities with the crime at all.
Stephen Dudley said there were failures in several different layers of the judicial system that led to the low rate of prosecution for homicides, and both he and Carlos Villalta were critical of the police. Stephen Dudley did also, interestingly, speak to me about the role of forensic scientists when it comes to crime scenes.
They're often too afraid to do their work. They do their work too quickly. They do their work sloppily. Just a complete lack of understanding of how to develop a crime scene. I've been to crime scenes where you've got little kids playing with a stick in blood of a victim.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:19
2
What is the missing students story and the 98% unsolved murders claim in Mexico?
2:19–5:27
3
How high is Mexico's homicide rate compared with other countries?
5:27–9:00
4
What do Mexico's conviction statistics reveal about solved homicides?
9:00–9:33