Comparisons of crime rates across countries often focus on homicides or murders. In 2025, the U.S. murder rate will be about 4 per 100,000 people—roughly 10% higher than Argentina’s 2025 homicide rate of 3.6 per 100,000. It looks like the U.S. murder rate for the first six months of this year has fallen even further, with an annual rate for the 66 largest cities at about 3.3 per 100,000.
Argentina, like the United States, uses two measures of crime: crimes reported to the police and total crime. In the United States, the Bureau of Justice Statistics measures total crime through the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). In Argentina, there is the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (known in Spanish as Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos, or INDEC) National Victimization Survey, though the last time it was conducted was in 2017. We have previously done a similar comparison with Australia and Canada.
Although the media and most public discussions focus on crimes reported to the police, victims report only a small share of violent crimes. This distinction becomes especially important when making international comparisons because reporting rates can vary dramatically across countries. For example, INDEC found that victims reported only 10% of rapes and sexual assaults in 2017. In 2017, the comparable reporting rate in the United States was 40.4%. In 2024, 48.1% of violent crimes in the US were reported to the police. Everything else being equal, the higher reporting rate in the United States would make its violent crime rate appear four times higher than Argentina’s in 2017 (40.4%/10%=4.04), even if both countries experienced exactly the same level of violent crime.
The differences in total crime rates between the two countries are striking. Although the 2025 reported-crime data show a higher rape and sexual-assault rate in the United States, the 2017 victimization surveys paint a dramatically different picture. Argentina’s survey found a sexual-offense victimization rate of 1,700 per 100,000 adults, compared with 140 rape and sexual-assault victimizations per 100,000 people in the United States—a twelvefold difference.
Even that comparison understates the difference because the Argentine survey counts victims, while the U.S. survey counts victimizations. If someone suffered two sexual assaults or two robberies, Argentina would count that person once, while the U.S. survey would count both incidents. The surveys also cover different age groups. Argentina surveyed adults age 18 and older, whereas the U.S. NCVS covers people age 12 and older. Consequently, a sexual assault of a 16-year-old would fall outside Argentina’s survey population but would be included in the U.S. survey.
There is another problem that also makes the U.S. look relatively worse and that involves aggravated assaults. The U.S. data includes the threat of assault, particularly if it involves a weapon.
Yet, despite these biases that make the U.S. look relatively worse than Argentina, the robbery rate in Argentina is still about 27 times worse, the aggravated assault rate is 38% worse, and the total violent crime rate is about five times higher.
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