El Paso Paradox - More From the Houston Chronicle

I previously blogged about the odd fact that the city of El Paso, TX has one of the lowest murder rates in the U.S., but is located across the Rio Grande from one of the most violent cities in the Western Hemisphere: Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

The Houston Chronicle had some interesting data about these two cities in Sunday's paper.

El Paso, a city of 600,000 reported just 16 homocides, a rate of 2.7/100,000.
Ciudad Juarez, a city of 1,500,000 reported 1500 homocides. A rate of 100/100,000.

The murder rate in Ciudad Juarez is 37.5 times that of El Paso.

The Chronicle article goes on to say:

Overall, reports of violent crime are down about 4 percent compared with 2007, El Paso Police spokesman Darrel Petry said.

An interesting phenomenon.