St. Louis Incorrectly Rated America's Most Dangerous City (Washington, Jackson: violent crime, house)

[aragx6]

^ I can't imagine it would be all that hard to simply do the study using the census-desginated urbanized area of the metro. That would be fair across the board, and much better for direct city-to-city comparisons, right?

Why the eff don't they do that!?

[moorlander]

If you're going to compare area vs area for a list, why not just use the metropolitan area statistics? The metro list is released at the same time as the city list but get ZERO publicity yet is a much more apples to apples comparison.

[flynavyj]

Originally Posted by BoomBoxing

The city being a part of the county won't do anything to change the stats or take the city off the most dangerous list.

Alright, you're gonna have to explain that one to me. Are the crimes listed on a per capita basis? or is the measurement actually Crime/Square Mile? If it's crime per Square mile, that simply wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to me when trying to compare anything...I can't even think of a way that comparing crimes per square mile would tell anyone ANYTHING regarding actual crime rates....unless you're adjusting everything towards an average, say if St. Louis had 500 crimes for a 62 square mile area that would equal 8 crimes per square mile...appx...so if you now take a city with 100 square miles, in order for it to be equal to st. louis, you'd have to have 800 crimes, if there are less crimes, the city has less crime per square mile than the other city, if more than more, but that just seems very relative as opposed to simply using crime per capita.

[BoomBoxing]

The type of merger being discussed is one where the city would still be it's own city but it'd be the 92nd muni in the county. So I imagine that cq would still count the city's crime stats by itself. The only type of merger that would lower the crime rate would be if the city and county became the same entity. I really don't see that happening.

[Smtchll]

Yeah, I think most people are saying the crime rate would drop if the city & county were one, like Nashville-Davidson. If the city & county were one city, it would have a density of 2,368 people per sq mile, which is still higher than cities like Kansas City, Louisville, Jacksonville, Indianapolis, Nashville, Memphis, and other decent-sized cities. So I feel like STL city+county would be a fair comparison to other cities.

[slengel]

^not necessarily, because then that would skew stl's stats against other cities with very small physical city limits such as san francisco, washington, dc, boston, cleveland, etc. the numbers are what they are for central cities. the numbers alone do not tell the whole story, that's all.

[DespicableMe]

Is there a list raking cities just by total homicides and violent crimes? I could only find one from 2007 and St Louis was #5 on it.

That's not exactly pretty reading, independent of the size and population.

[aragx6]

So you just want total, not per capita?

[DespicableMe]

Yep, I believe that would a better indicator right?

I mean there's a reason Detroit is considered dangerous and its because its number of homicides per year is more like 5 times 4 or 5 other bigger cities combined.

[Aceter]

If the FBI has allways warned against using it's data for comparisons because it would produce flawed math and false perceptions while Criminologists have lomg condemned it for the very same reasons. Why is CQ Press still allowed to list their bogus most dangerous city crap to this day?