Our Safety Comparison Methodology

The five conditions in our methodology

1. Same indicator. Both places measured on the same thing — for example intentional homicides per 100,000 people.
2. Same source family, comparable years. Figures drawn from the same statistical programme, for the same or adjacent years.
3. Same geographic level. City against city, or country against country. Never a city rate against a national rate.
4. Published methodology. The source documents how it counts, so its limitations can be stated alongside the number.
5. More than one indicator, or an explicit statement that only one is available.

If a fair comparison cannot be made, the page does not get made.

Which sources we use, and how far we trust them

The standing caveat

Every safety page on this site carries this, and it is not boilerplate:

Crime statistics are not directly comparable between countries. Recording practices, reporting rates and definitions differ. Homicide is the most consistently recorded category and is used here for that reason. Figures are shown with their year and source.

Reporting rate is the part that does most damage to naive comparisons. A country where people trust the police and report thefts will record more thefts than one where they do not. On paper the first country looks worse. The difference is confidence in institutions, not crime.

Claims we will not publish

• "Paraguay is the safest country in Latin America."
• "Asunción is as safe as Europe."
• "Asunción is completely safe" — or any equivalent for any city.
• "There is no crime in [place]."
• Any "safer than" claim resting on a Tier C source.
• Any statement of a national advisory level without also naming the areas assigned a higher one.

These are not hypothetical. Each is in circulation in this industry, and the last one is the most misleading, because it is technically accurate and materially incomplete.

What a defensible statement looks like

Paraguay is currently rated Level 1 — Exercise Normal Precautions — by the U.S. Department of State, which nonetheless assigns Level 2 — Exercise Increased Caution — to Alto Paraná, Amambay, Canindeyú, Concepción and San Pedro, citing criminal groups active along the north-eastern border with Brazil. Safety in Paraguay varies substantially by department. (Verified [date].)

It is longer than "Paraguay is safe". It is also checkable, which is the point.

The one exception, and why

The city map on Is Paraguay safe? compares Asunción with New York, Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires. It meets conditions 1, 3 and 4. All four figures are intentional homicide, for the same year, at city level, from sources that document how they count. It meets condition 5 by saying plainly that homicide is the only indicator shown. It does not meet condition 2: each figure comes from that city's own official statistics, not from one programme.

We publish it anyway, on three terms. It always appears next to a country comparison that meets all five conditions. It carries a visible note that it is not like for like. And it is never the basis of a "safer than" claim. If a single source with city-level figures for all four becomes available, we will switch to it.

Asunción-level data now comes from the Interior Ministry's department table, in which Asunción is its own unit. Comparisons with cities that have no published homicide statistics remain ruled out.

The conditions remain a deliberate constraint on our own content plan. Comparison pages are commercially attractive and easy to produce badly, which is exactly why the rule is written down in advance rather than applied case by case.

How to hold us to this

Every safety page on this site names its sources and the date they were checked. If you find a claim here that fails one of the five conditions above, it is a mistake and we want to know — the standard is meant to be enforceable by a reader, not just declared.