So once again the beautiful city of Cape Town gets dragged through the mud, this time by being ranked the 14th most violent city in the world, and most violent in South Africa by quite a margin.

The numbers come from an organization in Mexico which produces a list annually, of the world’s cities with more than 300 000 inhabitants. They use official numbers where available, an unofficial numbers when all else fails, which has led to some of the cities on the list criticizing them for that methodology.

Anyway, the bottom line is that 47 of the top 50 are in the Americas, mostly Central and Southern America. Three cities in SA make the Top 50: Cape Town, Nelson Mandela Bay (Port Elizabeth) and Durban. Cape Town has 60 murders per 100k population, which works out to 2,244 a year, or about 6 a day. PE and Durban by comparison are running at just under 35 per 100k population, almost half the rate of Cape Town. Johannesburg, for all its sins, does not make the top 50 at the moment.

Here’s a link to Google’s translated version of the press release.

What does not get mentioned in detail is that most of the violence is concentrated in a few areas with heavy gang activity, and much of the rest of the city is relatively peaceful.