Barbados Homicide Statistics January to mid-July 2024

There have been at least 27 murders (hereinafter referred to as homicides) in Barbados between January 1 and mid-July 2024. Reports of homicides in the local media continue to be my primary source of data and form the basis of my analysis. Due to other commitments there was a delay in posting 2024 homicide statistics. Also, the Barbados Murder Database (now the Barbados Homicide Database) has been re-launched and can be found at: https://data.caribbeansignal.com. Visitors to the Database can generate their own custom reports by selecting various criteria. At present data from previous years is being uploaded.

Note to Image 1: Parish information for one victim, Sonia Parris, was not available at the time of this post. As such, the map identifies 26 homicides despite 27 being recorded.

Note to Chart 2: Parish information was available for 26 of the 27 homicides (the exception being Sonia Parris as it is not clear which parish she was attacked/killed).

Note to Table 2: I’ve added per capita by parish values because looking at the absolute value of homicides by parish, without taking into consideration the population by parish, is not entirely accurate. For example, although St. Michael generally has the highest number of homicides in absolute terms, when we factor in its population size, along with the number of homicides and population sizes in other parishes, St. Michael is not always the highest (one limitation worth noting here is that the population numbers would have changed since 2010).

Note to Chart 4: ‘Other’ in this case refers to the beating (Anthony Ricardo Dyer) and chopping (Carlos Romell Bismark Howell) that took place on July 2 and July 10 respectively. ‘Unknown’ refers to Sonia Parris.

Note to Chart 5: At the time of this blog post, I could not locate age information was available for Sanjeev Nurse, Jermaine Babb and an unknown victim. The average age of victims is 32.7 years old. The youngest victim was 17 years old (Dashawn Hinkson) while the eldest victim was 58 years old (Sonia Parris).

Note to Chart 7: I define the weekend (WE) as Friday to Sunday, with the workweek (WW) running from Monday to Thursday. The two ‘Unknown’ refer to Shawn Maynard and Sonia Parris. Based on reports, it is not clear if they were attacked/killed during the WW or WE.

Note to Chart 9: The time reported in The Media of the incident is what I use to assign homicides to one of six time slots. However, it is important to note that in some cases, this may not be when the victim was attacked (or their time of death).

caribbeansignal.com is the personal blog of Amit Uttamchandani. The information presented here does not represent official crime or murder statistics, nor do they represent the views, beliefs, opinions, et cetera, of Amit’s employers or associates (past or present).