There have been at least 34 homicides in Barbados between January 1 and August 31. My count and subsequent analysis is based exclusively on what is reported by The Media. The numbers and analysis below are not to be treated as official in any form or fashion.
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 33 homicides despite 34 being recorded.
For the period under review (January to August), June has had the highest number of homicides thus far (9 or 26%).
Note for Chart 2: Parish information was available for 33 of the 34 homicides, with the exception of Sonia Parris, as the specific parish where she was attacked is unknown at the time of this post.
Further analysis of the parish data was conducted to identify patterns at the street/address level. The findings revealed that Black Rock and The Pine Street were the locations of 4 and 2 homicides respectively. Together, these areas accounted for 42% of the homicides (or 6 of the 14) in St. Michael between January and August 2024.
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.
Note to Chart 4: The one unknown refers to Sonia Parris. The two homicides categorized as ‘Other’ relate to physical beating/fighting alone.
24 out of 33 homicides, or 72%, were shooting related. Blade/Edged related refer to knives, cutlasses, et cetera. These made up 21% of homicides between January and August.
32% of homicide victims were between the ages of 25 to 34 years old (excluding 3 victims whose age were unknown at the time of this post). The average age of victims was 31 years old. The youngest victims were 17 years old while the eldest was 58 years old.
Note to Chart 7 – I define the weekend as Friday to Sunday, with the workweek running from Monday to Thursday.
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. Posts or comments made by Amit on this blog represent His personal views, opinions, thoughts, et cetera. Furthermore, the information presented in this particular do not represent official crime or murder statistics. Finally, the raw data, i.e., the Excel file(s) used to create this post, as well as raw data dumps from the Barbados Homicide Database are available for purchase.
I am liking your graphs more and more.
Figure 1. Putting the parishes in descending order of the magnitude of murders was a masterstroke. The reader does not have to ‘search’ the graph to gather that data for himself or herself.
Please allow me to make two minor comments
(1) Figure 1. In the title I would remove *=34, Put a total in the counts on the side with a star
Total 34*. There would be a line between Total and the last parish.
(2) Chart 2 – would also benefit from the footnote for unknown parish info for the death
Just a general comment ..I found it interesting that the population counts for St James are exactly twice that of St Thomas.
You must forgive me. I really enjoy your presentation of the data and that is what makes me comment.
My data may not be reliable