October 2022 Mexico Crime Rates

Official Mexico Crime Data

Each month the Secretariado Ejecutivo del Sistema Nacional de Seguridad Pública publishes information on crimes known to the police across all of Mexico on its website in the form of pdf tables and Excel files. This website downloads, processes the data, merges it with population data, and presents it as easy to interpret crime rates.

According to the Mexican Statistical Agency (INEGI) in Mexico there were a total of 36,773 homicides in 2020, according to the SESNSP there were a total of 34,555 murders that same year. That means the homicide crime rate was 29 per 100,000 in 2020. During the first six months of 2021 the INEGI reported a total 16,972 (provisional) and the SESNSP reported 16,950 murders.

Mexican crime data is available from police investigations (SESNSP) and also, in the case of homicides, from death certificates (INEGI). Crime data from the police is available in two ways: As the number of police reports (which may contain more than one victim), and the number of victims of a crime. Crime by the number of victims is usually only available at the state level and I try to use this data whenever possible. In this website kidnappings, homicides, and extortions refer to victims; car robberies to police reports. Car robbery includes the crime of robo de coche de 4 ruedas only. Homicides include femicides.

INEGI homicide data from death certificates tends to be more precise. Forensic coroners and the INEGI simply don't have the same incentives as the police to lower the number of homicides that happen in Mexico. In addition to homicide deaths, death certificates record deaths from legal interventions, operations of war, military operations, and terrorism, which I've added to the INEGI homicide counts. I also used a statistical model to predict the intent of deaths of unknown intent similar to the one in this post post. The disadvantage of using the INEGI data is it is usually more than a year out of date.

Intuitively, you can think of the statistical model as if someone were to ask you to guess the injury intent in the death of a 70-year-old Mérida woman whose cause of death was transport-related. You would probably answer it was an accident. On the other hand, if you had to guess the type of death of a young adult male whose cause of death was a firearm, and the injury took place on a public street in Ciudad Juárez, you would probably guess it was a homicide.

The chart below shows INEGI homicides without any statistical adjustment since 1990