Dr. James Thompson writes: The conclusion was that adolescents with low resting heart rate were more likely to go on to commit crimes, including violent crimes, possibly because they did not get too fussed when attacking others. Cool, calm, collected and lethal. All this takes place in the city of Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil…
Conclusions: Low resting heart rate predicted violent and non-violent crime for males, and was cross-sectionally associated with crime for females. Biological factors may contribute to individual propensity to commit crime, even in a middle-income setting with high rates of violence…
The key finding of this study is that lower heart rate was a robust predictor of male violent and non-violent crime.
So, something raises the level of violence in Brazil 30 times above Sweden, and 21 times above England and Wales. In the grizzly list of the 50 most dangerous cities in the world, Brazil accounts for 21 of them and Pelotas, violent as it is at 19 homicides per 10,000, is not one of them…
First, there is some evidence that heart rates vary by racial background…
From Richard Lynn’s The Global Bell Curve:
Statistics on race differences in crime indexed by rates of imprisonment are given by Telles (2004, p. 169) who reports that in Sao Paulo in 2000 blacks were 5.6 times over-represented in the prison population, while mulattos were 1.5 times over-represented, as compared with whites. Further statistics on race differences in crime were collected in the 1988 National Household Survey, a study of a representative sample of approximately 80,000 citizens. The survey asked the respondents whether they had been assaulted during the last year and if so, by whom. The results have been analyzed by Mitchell and Wood (1998), who calculated that compared with whites, mulattos were 1.2 times more likely to have been assaulted and blacks 1.5 times more likely to have been assaulted. Most of the assaults were perpetrated by acquaintances or police. In regard to assault by acquaintances, mulattos were 1.2 times more likely to have been assaulted than whites, and blacks were 1.9 times more likely to have been assaulted. Because most people’s acquaintances are of the same racial group as themselves, this indicates that assault rates are highest among blacks, lower among mulattos, and lowest among whites. In regard to assaults by police, blacks were 2.4 times more likely to have been assaulted than whites. There was no difference between mulattos and whites in the reported rates of assault by the police. The results suggest that police violence is much more strongly directed against blacks than against whites and mulattos.
Convictions for homicide in 2000 in Sao Paulo have been reported as 56.5 per 100,000 population for whites and 94.4 per 100,000 for blacks and Mulattos combined (Kilsztajn et al., 2000). The percentages of the races convicted of homicide for 2003 for the whole of Brazil have been given by Lopes (2006) and are shown in Table 4.10, together with their percentages in the population in 2000. It will be seen that the Asians have the lowest homicide rate at 0.4 percent drawn from 1 percent of the population; whites also have a relatively low homicide rate at 39.7 percent drawn from 53 percent of the population. Mulattos have a relatively high homicide rate at 49.9 percent for 40 percent of the population, while blacks have the highest homicide rate at 9.8 percent drawn from 6 percent of the population.
