By The Rio Times | Created at 2026-09-11 16:31:32 | Updated at 2026-09-11 17:42:43
1 hour ago
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC · SECURITY
Key Facts
- —The number The Dominican Republic’s accumulated murder rate stands at 7.39 per 100,000 inhabitants through 4 September 2026, according to the joint task force’s 164th weekly crime report.
- —The trend The rate has fallen every year since 2022, when it was 13.20. Last year closed at a validated 8.7, the presidency says.
- —The map Authorities say 28 territories covering 80 percent of the country now record single-digit murder rates.
- —The week Five murders and 34 people wounded were logged in the latest weekly period, alongside 563 robberies and 171 traffic accidents.
- —The region Independent crime trackers put Jamaica near 49, Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago around 40, and Puerto Rico near 15 murders per 100,000 — all far above the Dominican figure.
The Dominican Republic is on track to close 2026 with its lowest murder rate in decades — a number the government of Luis Abinader has made the centerpiece of its security record, and one its critics say deserves a closer look at the fine print.
One-stop reference
Company Intelligence
Every listed company in Latin America — financials, ownership and structure for 1,450+ companies across 26 exchanges, in one place.
The Dominican Republic’s accumulated homicide rate reached 7.39 per 100,000 inhabitants as of 4 September 2026, the Fuerza de Tarea Conjunta — the joint police-military task force that produces the country’s weekly crime statistics — reported in its 164th weekly analysis, published on 11 September.
If the trend holds, 2026 will be the safest year in the country’s modern crime statistics. The comparison set released with the report shows the accumulated rate at 8.74 for the same period of 2025, 9.65 in 2024, 11.49 in 2023 and 13.20 in 2022 — an almost unbroken decline of roughly 44 percent in four years.
A Quiet Week Behind the Headline Number
The weekly report that produced the 7.39 figure counted five murders and 34 people wounded by violence in the period under review, in a country of about 11 million. It also logged 563 robberies and 171 traffic accidents — a reminder that everyday insecurity in the Dominican Republic is less about homicide than about street robbery and some of the deadliest roads in the hemisphere.
Geographically, the improvement is broad. The task force says 28 territories, together covering 80 percent of the national territory, now post single-digit murder rates — meaning the remaining hotspots, concentrated in parts of Santo Domingo and a handful of provincial cities, account for a growing share of the killings that remain.
Two Sets of Books
There is a caveat built into the number, and the government itself acknowledges it. The weekly task-force figures are operational police statistics — preliminary counts that can be revised. The presidency announced in March that 2025 closed at a validated rate of 8.7 per 100,000, based on 951 intentional homicides, after the Interior and Police Ministry’s crime-data analysis center CADSECI and its operational technical unit consolidated and validated the year’s records. Notably, that validated figure came in 0.6 points above the task force’s own preliminary estimate for the year — validation cut the number up, not down.
The 8.74 in this week’s comparison set is a different beast: the accumulated operational rate to the same September cut-off last year, not a full-year close. That distinction is exactly where the political argument lives. Opposition voices have long questioned which deaths enter the official count, how “intentional homicide” is defined against broader violent-death categories, how foreign-national victims are treated, and how often cases are reclassified after the weekly snapshot. None of that overturns the trend: available independent analyses of Dominican homicide data all point the same way. But it does mean the 7.39 should be read as a strong operational signal, not a final audited statistic.
An Outlier in a Violent Neighborhood
Set against the region, the Dominican number is striking. Independent crime-data trackers put Jamaica’s murder rate near 49 per 100,000, Haiti’s and Trinidad and Tobago’s around 40, and Puerto Rico’s near 15. Those comparisons come with their own methodology warnings — different countries count differently, and Haiti’s statistics are fragmentary in the best of times — but the orders of magnitude are not in dispute.
Within Latin America as a whole, where regional averages still sit well into double digits, a rate in the sevens would place the Dominican Republic among the safer countries on the continent. Security analysts such as InSight Crime have noted the country’s trajectory, while cautioning that low homicide rates coexist with persistent organized crime, drug transshipment and contract killing markets that rarely show up in the headline number.
Abinader’s Security Card
For President Luis Abinader, the statistics are political capital. Citizen security was one of his administration’s flagship promises, and the government now opens nearly every security presentation with the homicide curve. The validated 8.7 close for 2025 was announced from the National Palace itself — a sign of how central the number has become to the official narrative.
Critics counter that the homicide rate is the wrong single lens: robbery, extortion and femicide weigh heavily in public perception surveys, and trust in the police remains fragile. The weekly report’s own 563 robberies in seven days illustrate why many Dominicans say they do not feel as safe as the murder statistics suggest they should.
Still, the direction of travel is now long enough to be undeniable. A country that recorded 13.20 murders per 100,000 just four years ago is measuring itself in the sevens — and in a Caribbean basin where several neighbors are moving the other way, that divergence may be the Abinader government’s most durable claim on the record.
