29 Homicides in Seven Months: Where SVG Ranks in the Caribbean
The fatal shooting of Clydon Cato in Dickson on Saturday was St Vincent and the Grenadines’ 29th homicide of 2026. Measured the way criminologists compare countries, against the size of the population, that toll places SVG among the deadliest societies in the Caribbean.
The math
Twenty-nine killings in the first seven months of the year, in a country of roughly 100,000 people, works out to about 29 homicides per 100,000 residents already. If the current pace holds through December, SVG is on track for a rate of around 50 per 100,000 for the full year. That would be higher than its actual 2025 rate and close to the level it reached in 2024.
For comparison, the global average homicide rate sits below eight per 100,000. A rate near 50 is more than six times that.
Third in the region, and climbing
On the most recent complete year of data, InSight Crime’s 2025 Homicide Round-Up ranked SVG among the three highest homicide rates in the Caribbean, behind only Haiti and Turks and Caicos. The round-up put SVG’s 2025 rate at 40 per 100,000, down from 54 in 2024, and noted that with a population of only around 100,000, the country’s rate is highly volatile.
The rest of the region sat well below. Turks and Caicos closed 2025 at 57.6, its wild swings driven by a population under 50,000. Jamaica, long the regional byword for gun violence, fell to 23.7, nearly half its 2024 figure. Saint Kitts and Nevis dropped to 13.6, and the Dominican Republic recorded the region’s lowest rate at 8.7. The Caribbean median for 2025 was 34.0. Ecuador, a South American mainland state often cited alongside the region, hit a record 50.9.
Against that backdrop, SVG’s 2026 trajectory does not move it down the table. A full-year rate near 50 would keep it firmly in the top tier, plausibly second or third in the Caribbean and comfortably above far larger nations such as Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago.
Read the number with care
- It is not a finished result. The 50 per 100,000 figure is a projection from seven months, annualised. A quieter or a bloodier second half would move it sharply.
- It is not a true head-to-head. No country has full-year 2026 numbers yet, so SVG’s 2026 pace is being set against other nations’ 2025 finals.
- It is not stable. In a country of about 100,000, a single incident swings the rate. The Chinatown triple killing in Kingstown on 17 July moved SVG’s rate by roughly three points in one night.
What sits behind the toll
InSight Crime attributes the vast majority of SVG’s killings to gang activity, describing five or six criminal groups battling one another, with illegal firearms a constant thread. The pattern in 2026 fits: the year’s deadliest single episode was the brazen daylight-adjacent triple shooting in Chinatown, a few hundred metres from the Central Police Station, and several victims have had prior brushes with the courts.
The bottom line is uncomfortable but simple. Even discounted for the smallness of the population, and even read with every caveat attached, St Vincent and the Grenadines is killing its people at a rate that ranks with the worst in the hemisphere, and the 2026 figures are not bending the trend downward.