Re “Don’t paint Baja California with such a broad brush” (May 17): The letter writer’s use of raw numbers of murders in the U.S. (21,156 in 2023) in an attempt to minimize the horrific state of crime in Mexico is at best misleading. A more informative statistic that takes into account the population differences between the two countries is the per capita rate of homicides. For 2023, that is approximately 6.2 per 100,000 residents in the U.S. and 23.1 per 100,000 residents in Mexico. In other words, murders occurred in Mexico at close to four times the rate in the U.S.!
— Bruce Osachy, Mira Mesa