National violence data

As usual, there is lots of valuable data and analysis of crime in this year’s Atlas da Violência, published by IPEA in conjunction with the Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, with data through 2018. The report highlights that homicides have begun declining back to 2011 levels. While this is of course good news, it is colored by the fact that as the report notes, much of the run-up in homicides was a consequence of horrific violence between organized crime groups in 2017, that homicide rates in ten of Brazil’s 27 states still surpass 39 per 100,000, and the national homicide rate is still nearly 28 per 100,000, meaning that thee were nearly 58 thousand lives lost to violence across Brazil.