U.S. vs Canada: Assault Edition (Part 2)

Over the holidays, we updated and corrected our original analysis of the rate of assaults in both the United States and Canada. It turns out that one of our original charts had only shown the number of Level 2 and 3 assaults for Canada rather than all nonfatal, nonsexual assaults and our calculation of the total assault rate for Canada was also off by about 30 assaults per 100,000 Canadians.

Today, we're going to revisit that analysis and then take things one step further and do a more direct comparison of the rate of assaults between the populations of the two nations by extracting the assault rate data for the portion of the U.S. population that is most demographically similar to the entire population of Canada.

First, let's take a look at the total number of nonfatal, nonsexual assaults for the entire populations of both nations in 2006 in the following chart:

Here, we see that Canadians experienced some 253,704 assaults in 2006, while Americans recorded 1,598,706 nonfatal, nonsexual assaults in the same year.

Next, because the size of the two nations' populations is so different, let's compare the rate of assaults for each 100,000 people in both nations in our next chart. Note that the U.S. data is based upon the entire population, include the nation's very large black and Hispanic sub-populations, which are nearly absent in Canada (Canadian blacks make up about 2% of that nation's population, while the percentage share of Hispanics in Canada make up less than 1% of Canada's population.):