The impact of the drug war in Mexico

[This article was first published on Revolutions, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

For the last couple of years, Mexico has been in the midst of an escalating drug war, with violent crime on the upswing in many areas. But tracking the impact quantitatively is difficult: in Mexico, about 85% of crimes go unreported, and corruption leads to inaccurate reporting in some districts. Diego Valle has taken on the task of visualizing and analyzing the available data with R, and has come up with some startling results. For example, by comparing national with local statistics, Diego has identified a massive underreporting of 1153 murders in the state of Chihuahua:

Crime-reporting

Diego even employs Benford’s Law to uncover evidence of data falsification. There’s lots more fascinating analysis in Diego’s report, including this choropleth of homicide rate across Mexico:

Murder-mexico

On a personal note, we’d planned to return to a favorite vacation spot near Zihuatanejo this year. After hearing from locals that the once-tranquil village had been overrun, we cancelled our planned trip. Zihua is near the centre of that hotspot on the south-central coast.

Read Diego’s full post for lots more great analysis. He’s made all of his R code available, too.

Diego Valle’s Blog: Statistical Analysis and Visualization of the Drug War in Mexico

To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: Revolutions.

R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job.
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

Never miss an update!
Subscribe to R-bloggers to receive
e-mails with the latest R posts.
(You will not see this message again.)

Click here to close (This popup will not appear again)