Press "Enter" to skip to content

Peace Out: South Dakota Least Peaceful State in Region, 20th Nationwide

The Institute for Economics and Peace issues its United States Peace Index, ranking the fifty states on their "peacefulness." IEP bases its USPI on five indicators: "the number of homicides, number of violent crimes, the incarceration rate, number of police employees and the availability of small arms."

The good news: the United States "is more peaceful now than at any other time over the last twenty years." That's funny: just the other day, a nice conservative retireee (who signed my HB 1234 petition) told me that everything was going to hell under President Obama.

His perception must have been skewed by the local bad news: South Dakota ranks just 20th on the U.S. Peace Index.

United States Peace Index 2010, issued April 24, 2012, by Institute for Economics and Peace, http://www.visionofhumanity.org/uspeaceindex/
United States Peace Index 2010, issued April 24, 2012, by Institute for Economics and Peace, http://www.visionofhumanity.org/uspeaceindex/

Lower numbers are good; higher numbers are bad. South Dakota's Peace Index in 2010 was 2.32, higher than that in any adjoining state. Hurting our score are our higher-than average incarceration rate and the presence of lots of small arms (Gordon Howie will dispute the validity of that metric).

Minnesota is the most peaceful state in the region, ranking fourth nationwide with a USPI of 1.61. North Dakota is close behind, ranking sixth at 1.74... although one must wonder how much the Bakken oil boom and associated increase in crime have affected that numbers since the 2010 data used for this scorecard.

Taking a longer view, IEP finds 31 states saw their Peace Index improve from 1991 to 2010.

U.S. Peace Index change from 1991 to 2010, from Institute for Economics and Peace, http://www.visionofhumanity.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/2012-United-States-Peace-Index-Report.pdf
U.S. Peace Index change from 1991 to 2010, from Institute for Economics and Peace

Unfortunately, South Dakota isn't just in the minority of peace decliners; our fair state has seen the worst change in Peace Index over the last two decades, and increase (remember, larger scores are worse) of 57.43%. And perhaps oddly, many of the declines took place in our fellow states here in supposedly tranquil middle America.

Also worth noting: while our country is enjoying declines in homicides and violent crime, the United States still ranks just 82nd out of 153 countries on the Global Peace Index, right behind China and Gabon, but just ahead of Bangladesh and Serbia. Iceland, New Zealand, Japan, and Denmark are the most peaceful countries. No wonder we sing about being the land of the free and the home of the brave.

38 Comments

  1. larry kurtz 2012.04.25

    My role as regional apologist for the first Obama term can be daunting. It must be said that the US and her institutions are under continual attack...24/7/365 as a result of the previous administration's crimes against humanity.

    Your post, Cory, is clearly evidence for how individual northern states cope with the rigors of being trapped behind the barricades of entitlement, racism and paranoia.

    Red state collapse is not terminal. Return to sanity, South Dakota: throw the bums out.

  2. Carter 2012.04.25

    One thing that always bothers me about gun control is that it seems to ignore the real problem.

    Few people would dispute that most gun violence takes place among the lower class. It's a fairly strong correlation. The greater the poverty, the greater the likelihood of violence. Instead of jumping straight into gun control and saying "That will fix thing!" Why not advocate fixing poverty? Many people in ghettos can't get jobs, they can't get a good education, so they're left with little but resorting to violence. Fix that, and violence goes down significantly.

  3. cefil 2012.04.25

    Watch out, Cory; you can cause yourself serious injury by going through such contortions trying to give SD a black eye. There are plenty of things for which to legitimately criticize our state leadership right now, why try to make fake hay from such a meaningless report? You just end up making yourself look foolish.

    For what it’s worth (which isn’t much), South Dakota actually comes out quite well in the report. We’re very similar to all of our neighbors, and vastly better than such liberal icons as California, New York, Illinois…and 60% of all other states.

    Absolutely no story here…Move along to something of substance.

  4. larry kurtz 2012.04.25

    @cefil Frustrated conservative trapped in the bureaucracy in Pierre.

    Fort Pierre, SD ·

  5. roger elgersma 2012.04.25

    We added the death penalty.

  6. John Hess 2012.04.25

    I'm not buying it. South Dakota is one of the safest places I've been. You feel it and you know it. When I lived in CA a jogger was stabbed for no reason by some weirdo as she ran by my apartment building. I heard her screams. At my next place a pizza guy was shot and killed for his change by a druggie. Madison is especially safe and our local cops are incredibly responsive.

  7. Carter 2012.04.25

    Maybe the reservations are included?

  8. caheidelberger Post author | 2012.04.25

    Carter, page 32 of the IEP's full report notes that the Peace Index has a reasonably strong correlation with the percentage of families in poverty (higher USPI/less peaceful state means likely to have more families in poverty). Some similarly strong or stronger correlates:

    --% high school grads
    --life expectancy
    --teen pregnancy rate
    --infant mortality rate
    --household Gini coefficient (income inequality)
    --% of children in single-parent families
    --social capital
    --perception of trust

  9. John Hess 2012.04.25

    Oh, and there's that time my truck was being stolen but the neighbor heard him grinding through my steering wheel lock. And that time I mistakenly fell asleep at Balboa Park and someone tried to steal my shoes. Really I could go on and on.

  10. John Hess 2012.04.25

    Oh come on Cory. When's the last time someone tried to steal your shoes? It doesn't happen (much) in SD.

  11. John Hess 2012.04.25

    One more. For the hundredth time I was being asked for money in downtown San Diego, but this guy was menacing. I looked across the street and saw a cop. He followed by glance and told me I wouldn't make it that far. Screw him. He didn't get no money. South Dakota is a peaceful place. That's one thing we really do have.

  12. caheidelberger Post author | 2012.04.25

    John, indeed, I feel pretty safe, too, safer than the numbers above suggest I should. Page 15 of the report gives the state scores in each category. California ranks 32nd. California gets higher/worse scores in homicides, violent crime, and incarceration rates. We get higher/worse scores in police employees and small arms.

    It does seem odd that a state gets a worse score for employing more people in keeping the peace. But IEP appears to take the position in its methodology that every dollar spent on the police force is a dollar that could be spent on other public goods that might better enhance peace (education, infrastructure, health care, even tax cuts to stimulate the private sector).

    They apply a similar logic on incarceration. It's not just that high incarceration rates indicate lots of criminal activity or that prisoners experience extraordinary amounts of violence behind bars. "When a skilled person is placed in prison," says the report, "there is a decay in their skills during the term of their incarceration, affecting their future productivity. Similarly, if an employed person is placed in prison then their earning capacity is lost to society" [p. 36].

    Even if you and I feel safe walking down the street, South Dakota still pays the price of violence. IEP estimates the total economic costs of our nonpeacefulness at $899 million a year. They contend that if we managed improve our peace index to the level of Maine, we could save $408 million a year.

  13. PrairieLady 2012.04.25

    As an older woman living in Sioux Falls, there are times I do not feel as safe as in the past years. The neighborhood I live in is in an older nice part of town, but there have been things which have happened in the last years, which have made me lock my doors when I am here. I would not have done that 10 years ago.
    My neighborhood, which is by Lincoln HS, has become very diverse, but that is not the problem. There were alot of homes that were boughten and turned into rentals. When that happened we had alot of questionable people who rented those home. I found crack pipes, had a gun incident on the business property behind me and more people wandering around who were scary. Luckily the rental property owners sold the property to private individuals and we have less problems.
    There are neighborhoods in SF I would not go into at night, although I would have gone there 15 years ago. There were a few of us single Moms who use to watch our HS age kids because we knew they were headed for trouble. But back then.... the city did not want to acknowledge there were gangs starting to infiltrate SD. (We did work with the police and they were sending officers to Denver for gang training.)
    No.... I am not as happy or feel as safe in SD anymore. It is not that peaceful and safe state I came to live in. Ok...so I am a little off topic...sorry.

  14. John Hess 2012.04.25

    No Prairie Lady. You are not off topic. I have heard this many times. That SF is not safe like it once was. But, SF has been growing and changing for many years. It's not facts and figures. It's how we feel. And that's perspective.

  15. Carter 2012.04.25

    Cory, to me, then, number of small arms and level of poverty separately increasing peace is redundant. Take the poverty out of the ghettos, make them decent places, and violence goes down.

    Madison is chalk full of guns, and we've had what? Like half a dozen murders, ever? It's poverty and drugs that increase violence. Help people out of poverty and legalize drugs, and your violence problem is solved. I don't think gun control will matter much.

    Besides, how do we fight la revolucion if we don't have some small arms?

  16. caheidelberger Post author | 2012.04.25

    I agree with John. Gayle's observation is perfectly relevant. South Dakota has lots of stereotypical small towns. We also have burgeoning urban areas, Indian reservations, and a major highway corridor for cross-country drug-trafficking. Contrary to a suggestion above, I'm not contorting myself or the facts in any way to give South Dakota a black eye. South Dakota's Peace Index has been getting steadily worse. Our state has many advantages, but it also has increasingly rough neighborhoods and other harsh realities beyond the image we want to paint for ourselves. Good policy requires looking at those realities.

  17. John Hess 2012.04.25

    Mostly now I find myself curious how many other South Dakotans have had their shoes stolen. There was this other time (in CA) I woke up to find my favorite pair of green canvas designer shoes had left the premises. What kind of person steals your shoes? Not someone from South Dakota! My boss used to ask me, why are you working, when everyone else is talking? It's a South Dakota thing! Since returning to South Dakota, I have not had another pair of of shoes stolen. Give us some credit.

  18. caheidelberger Post author | 2012.04.25

    Oh, don't worry, Carter: I'm not trying to spin these numbers to advocate greater government restrictions on guns. I find the IEP's approach to calculating gun impacts interesting: no one has an accurate count of the number of guns in each state, so they use the rather well-researched proxy of the percentage of suicide committed by firearms. So that figure isn't just about the number of guns lying around but about our willingness to use those guns on ourselves. I'll bet we could look at that number (and the suicide rate in general) and learn something about our sense of peace.

    By the way, South Dakota's suicide rate is 33% higher than the national suicide rate, 54% higher than California's, and 118% higher than New York's. Sounds like more despair... and I'll bet, Carter, we can track that despair to economic factors. Like you, I think we can make more pro-peace progress by working for economic justice than trying to round up all the guns.

  19. Douglas Wiken 2012.04.25

    I attended the U of Rochester for about a year. My wife and I were living in an old house across the Genesee River from the U of R campus. The couple who lived there before us were friends of some of the neighborhood Blacks. They knocked on our door looking for them. The next morning my only pair of "dress" shoes was gone from our porch. They were a synthetic leather that was popular for a year or two. Right now I can't remember the brand name however.

    We have had seven 3200 bushel grain bins emptied. That was a few thousand bucks gone. Several windows shot out of our house. We weren't here at the time, but my wife's aunt had left minutes before that.

    Law enforcement in rural areas is a sick joke.

  20. Douglas Wiken 2012.04.25

    Of course, I just remembered. The shoes were Corfam.
    From Wikipedia:
    Poromeric imitation leather

    Sometimes referred to as poromerics, poromeric imitation leathers are a group of synthetic "breathable" leather substitutes made from a plastic coating (usually a polyurethane) on a fibrous base layer (typically a polyester).

    The term poromeric was coined by DuPont as a derivative of the terms microporous and polymeric. The first poromeric material was DuPont's ill-fated Corfam introduced in 1963 at the Chicago Shoe Show.

    Corfam was the centerpiece of the DuPont pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair in New York City. Its major advantages over natural leather were its durability and its high gloss finish that could be easily cleaned with a damp cloth. Its disadvantages were its stiffness which did not lessen with wearing, its relative lack of breathability, and easy confusion with non-breathable cheaper products. DuPont manufactured Corfam at its plant in Old Hickory, Tennessee, from 1964 to 1971. After spending millions of dollars marketing the product to shoe manufacturers, DuPont withdrew Corfam from the market in 1971 and sold the rights to a company in Poland.

    Corfam is still used today in some products, an example being certain types of equestrian saddle girth. Corfam shoes are still popular in uniformed professions where shiny shoes are desirable.

  21. Carter 2012.04.25

    Cory, our poverty level doesn't seem to be that out of place, on the general level. However, I've noted that there has been at least one report that South Dakota has the lowest average wage in the nation, and I seriously doubt we have the lowest cost of living in the nation.

    Addressing the prison issue, I believe that if we pursued a prison system more like Norway's, and focused on rehabilitation, and less on selling prisons to corporations and focus on prisoners-for-profit, the economic impact of the prison system would be drastically lower.

  22. John Hess 2012.04.25

    Douglas, Minnesota makes my point. They are supposed to be more "peaceful." Someone stole your patent leather shoes. That's really quite funny in retrospect. Your other significant loss not so.

    When moving in to my first apartment in California, a homeless person was taking blankets from my truck. My older sister asked him what he was doing. He told her he needed them. She told him her little brother needed them.

    I used to hear gunfire. My sister was scared to visit me there. Being safe is not something to be taken for granted. South Dakota is a relatively safe (extremely safe) place.

  23. grudznick 2012.04.25

    These libby goofball groups' version of "peace" does not sit well in my gullet, young Mr. H.

  24. caheidelberger Post author | 2012.04.25

    O.K., back the truck up. First, establish for us the basis on which you deem this group "libby goofballs." Is it some documentable evidence, or just your desire to reject their thesis?

  25. Stan Gibilisco 2012.04.25

    When I first moved here to Lead, I remember looking at a Web site that compared city crime rates around the country. They had pie graphs that broke the crime down into "slices" whose angular size depended on percentage ... you know the drill.

    Lead's pie was a blank disc. No crime to report.

    That said, I have three tenants right now that like to get drunk and hit each other, constantly landing them in jail. So crime does exist here. Yet, somehow, I feel pretty safe, even around them. Maybe it's all those books on Zen that I've read over the years.

    I suspect that some of our low crime statistics depends on how we define crime. Having lived in Miami and Los Angeles, I'd define "crime" as something like murder, robbery, and grand theft. Getting drunk and throwing a tantrum is pretty mild stuff, and especially around Deadwood, I'll bet a lot of it just goes unreported. Some guy (or gal) gets out of control at a bar, and friends just pack the pickle up and haul it to the hotel to sleep it off.

    I've left wood pellets in the back of my pickup all winter, perfectly good heating fuel, serving only as weight, and nobody has touched any of it.

  26. Ken Blanchard 2012.04.26

    This is utter nonsense. It is a typical strategy of faux ratings outfits to focus on a desired policy outcome and then judge states or whatever by how they meet a list of favored criteria that have little or nothing to do with the outcome.

    Employing a lot of police and incarcerating a lot of people may involve costs that are not justified, but they are no indicators of peacefulness. Would the state become more peaceful if we release more men who abused their spouses and girlfriends? Likewise with the number of small arms.

    If "peacefulness" means anything it means going about your day without fear of violence. By that standard, most of the people living in South Dakota enjoy more peacefulness that almost all human beings in recorded history (and prehistory, I might add).

    Violence on the reservations is a relevant criteria. The rest is useless.

  27. caheidelberger Post author | 2012.04.26

    Ken, it's no more utter nonsense than the business climate ratings our state celebrates. Those ratings are at least as driven by a specific policy agenda (Grover Norquistian anarcho-capitalism) as the Peace Index... which none of the skeptics on this post have managed to indict. What is IEP's ideological bias? What is their desired policy outcome?

    Check out page 9 of the IEP's full report. It gives the weights of each of the five criteria:

    --Homicides: 4
    --Violent Crime: 4
    --Incarceration: 3
    --Police Employees: 3
    --Small Arms: 1

    IEP says that the small arms count (measured by the proxy of percentage of suicide carried out by firearm) is the least important of the five criteria. Incarceration and spending on police are secondary to murder and crime.

    I agree with Ken that we enjoy a more peaceful existence than most people in history and much more peaceful than cavemen (though I don't think "Better than living in caves" will work as a state motto). But a lot of states are managing to provide more peaceful lives for their citizens while pouring fewer resources (proportionately) into police and prisons.

    I'm not advocating wholesale release of all prisoners or confiscation of all weapons. I am asking what has us so nervous that we feel as if we need to arm ourselves so heavily and have such a large apparatus of state force.

  28. Douglas Wiken 2012.04.26

    U of Rochester is in New York State. Genesee River runs into Lake Erie. Lake effect snowstorms, rains, etc. Strange weather, but beautiful trees because they don't get our prairie winds. A Rochester neighbor family's daughter and husband plan to visit us this summer. Her parents were a lot like Edith and Archie Bunker. They took pity on naive South Dakotans.

  29. Ken Blanchard 2012.04.26

    Cory: that means that 7 out of 15 points are determined by criteria that raise the hackles of the folks IEP but have no coherent relationship to what they claim to be measuring. Again, utter nonsense.

  30. Douglas Wiken 2012.04.26

    What we need is a top ten list of Blanchard posts.

    More seriously, I think we should always be wary of any rating systems (or top ten lists) whether they be for teachers and students or for governments or for peacefulness or lack thereof of residents.

  31. caheidelberger Post author | 2012.04.26

    No, Ken, there is at least a coherent argument to be made for the relevance of the lower-weighted items. See their methodology and above comments thereupon. I'm looking for the substantiation for dismissing the IEP analysis as an agenda-driven report.

  32. Ken Blanchard 2012.04.26

    How about logic? If two muggers are around the corner, that is a less peaceful situation than one. No? If two policemen are around the corner, is that a less peaceful situation? I rest my case.

  33. caheidelberger Post author | 2012.04.27

    That still doesn't support the accusation that IEP has some political agenda. That also ignores the aspect of their methodology that says the more resources a society invests in police and prisons, the less it has for roads, bridges, tax cuts, and economic development. I recognize that can't be an absolute principle; there is some ideal point between complete militarization and zero law enforcement. But IEP is looking beyond abstract hypotheticals and considering real data. Where's the flaw?

  34. WayneB 2012.04.27

    The Methodology (p.8) is very interesting:

    The starting point in creating the USPI was to imagine a
    perfectly peaceful state. In such a state there would be
    no direct violence, and thus no homicide and no violent
    crime. In addition, there would be no need for state
    violence against its citizens and therefore no need for the
    state to devote resources to violence containment. Thus,
    there would be no police employees and no incarceration.
    Finally, in a perfectly peaceful state, citizens would have no
    need to own firearms for the purpose of self-defense, and
    therefore there would be no ownership of small arms.

    Such a hypothetical state is aspirational rather than
    realistic, and as such the USPI scores reflect no moral
    judgement on the appropriate level of police employment,
    incarceration, or firearm ownership.

    Different contexts and circumstances will call for different
    government responses to the problem of violence.
    Therefore, USPI scores should be seen as a measure
    of how close a state currently is to realizing a perfectly
    peaceful environment.

  35. WayneB 2012.04.27

    To follow up, it seems IEP acknowledges that while it is desirable to strive towards an ideal, the ideal is ultimately unattainable (this corresponds well to my libertarian leanings).

    As someone who hunts to put food on the table, for exercise, and companiosnship, I would disagree philosophically with the assertion that small arms ownership should and would disappear. Combined with the squishiness of their metric - using suicides committed with firearms to determine ownership - I'm not sure it even belongs in the study (and that's even after reading Appendix B and following their sources).

    A better (but most likely labor-intensive) metric would be to see how many cases of self defence there are which involve the defender using a firearm.

    However, we're talking about only 1/15 of the weight, so it's not a super big gripe.

    What is a gripe for me is the nuanced explanation of their methodology and measurement of states and nations against an unattainable ideal contravenes the casual consumer's initial understanding of "peace" in a very practical and pragmatic fashion.

    In the real and fungible world, we need law enforcement to keep the peace, and we need places to keep violent offenders. While it may look more authoritarian, incarcerating more people and getting more police on the streets should help reduce the amount of violent crimes.

    In effect, the IEP penalizes states for efforts to create a more peaceful environment.

    What the IEP is really trying to measure is how inherently placid a population is... which paints an interesting picture as the Midwest ages. Mom & Dad aren't losing their p*ss & vinegar afterall. ;-)

Comments are closed.