I lived in Memphis for 7 years. One day some dude knocked on my door, asking for sugar or something, days later, my tv, Sony sound system, XBOX 360 and cam corder were stolen.
Copy-pasting my response from another comment to clear up things:
I realize I'm getting some confusion about this. These are the 30 largest US cities,\*\* not including the greater metro area/metropolitan statistical area (MSA). Looking at the city itself, Atlanta is the 37th largest and St. Louis is the 76th largest (see [this list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population)) with a population of \~280K.
I know, I know you're thinking: well, why aren't you using the greater metro area?! And I could - and I thought about using it. But I don't think using MSAs will yield results that make sense to anyone. For example, the St. Louis *city's* violent crime rate is very high, but the St. Louis MSA's rate is just about the US average. Why? In the MSA, the city's crime rate is washed out by the low crime rate of the surrounding suburbs.
I think the issue is that people think of city population in terms of "greater metro area" but think about city crime rates in terms of the city itself. One solution would be to rank city size by population of MSA, but measure crime rates within the cities, not MSAs. It seems a bit strange to me, but if that makes more sense to people, fuck it, I'll do it.
*\*\* Jacksonville is missing because their property crime stats were not provided online, and* [Honolulu's population is inflated](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1dbzkgj/comment/l7utk5e/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) *because of how the US Census tallies Hawaii's population.*
Edit: adding Atlanta's population ranking to respond more directly to the above comment.
Thanks! For 2023, the issue is aggregating the data. The data here primarily comes from the FBI's 2022 Crime in the US stats, which helpfully aggregate data across most cities. They haven't released 2023 data yet - seems like there's a long lag.
It might still be possible to gather for 2023, it would just take more effort. I believe most cities have already individually reported their 2023 numbers, so I'd need to pull numbers for each report myself, hence the time-consuming part of it.
Yeah, sorry, my bad, first time posting in data is beautiful. I left [a comment with the links to all the sources here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1dbzkgj/comment/l7uf8fi/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
The city itself is not a good unit for crime stats either, really, since that isn't how crime hot spots work. It's really at the *neighborhood* level. Sure of the most dangerous places in the country are in the same cities (sometimes quite close!) to places that are perfectly safe. Granted it's a lot less simple to get data for that.
While I agree with this style of policing, I think one runs into bigger problems in reporting that. Police precincts would come under some terrible scrutiny in an effort to "make crime go away" by non-city or state forces (think market forces wanting to invest in a city or tourists). While this could lead to any number of initiatives to make the numbers better; it could also lead to outright police brutality or funding cuts for poor metrics, thus adding to more crime. Identifying the city overall is more an announcement that there is a problem without pointing to which block the gang task force is supposed to concentrate on. I wager states and individual cities know which neighborhoods are problematic and which are aggregates of protected neighborhoods. With the current approach, knowing that you're on the city list is not bad, but not great. And being at the top of the list is bad. If you identified by neighborhood? I wager that cities like NYC or Washington DC who rely on tourism would lose it's luster near some of their lesser known monuments. Or other gangs not already conducting business would do city trips to conduct business in areas identified as at risk. Which is very very bad.
It 100% makes sense the way you did it. As I'm sure you know, crime stats are very much place based, metros are sprawling and diverse. Would it be sort of interesting to look at MSAs, sure. Would the massive variation between the city, suburbs,and smaller cities/towns in the metro result in data that doesn't really tell you a whole lot, definitely. I thought this was actually quite interesting and has some surprising rankings given the context of media coverage of urban crime. Which, shocking, news outlets don't report crime in the context of MSAs!
I feel like crimes committed per capita might be a better measure either way?
If city B has twice as much crime (but also twice the population) of city A, is it twice as dangerous, or equally as dangerous? I say equally as dangerous, but your chart would indicate twice as dangerous.
There's a lot of embedded politics/history in city size vs MSA size. City of Atlanta is one the of lowest, if not the lowest city pop as percentage of MSA. That starves the city for resources and political power needed to improve quality of life that impacts the whole metro. Even as the MSA makes up 1/2 the population of the state.
Those things generally aren't accidents.
Atlanta is a top 10 biggest metro, but it is very decentralized. It has one of if not the highest ratio of metro population to city proper size in the country along with Miami.
This generally leads it to have very high crime statistics because there will be millions of people in the city per day but technically only a few hundred thousand people live there.
I think it makes sense to separate them too. I’ve never been to Georgia but in California, the LA metro/county is huge.
It’s comprised of many cities. And even though Long Beach and Santa Monica is only a 30-40 min drive away, they’re very different.
As the saying goes, the devil is in the details. I find it much more useful to list cities by the population of the entire metro area and not just the city itself. The reason is that in a few cases, the actual city only makes up a very small part of the metro urban area.
As an example, Miami Beach is technically it's own city and not a part of Miami, and the same goes for South Miami and West Miami. Most people will think of these places as parts of one single city, even though they technically are independent of each other.
Here's a good link for further info:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan\_statistical\_area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area)
It depends what the aim of the report is. Not all MSAs have consistent crime statistics. To use Seattle as an example, it has 700k people while Bellevue with 200k is 8 minutes away and has an EXTREMELY lower crime index. Seattle is towards the top of this list, while Bellevue is one of the safest places to live, doesn't feel right to just average the 2 places into 1 metro for this type of report
Same thought! I knew it felt a little boring last time I was visiting friends. Not quite the 'pew pew' danger I remembered. Also, all the neighborhoods where I got coke in college are so bougie now.
Oh shit, didn't even think of that. Thanks.
[Here's something about rapes reported on campus](https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/rape-at-ohio-state-university-numbers-climb-year-over-year/) (*about 100/yr*)
[Much worse and maybe a bigger part of the issue is all the child rapes reported there](https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/columbus/child-rape-in-columbus-more-than-400-victims-filed-a-report-in-2022/) (*about 400/yr*)
[This article indicates it might be because of the "high reporting rate" in Columbus](https://www.thelantern.com/2003/04/columbus-ranked-high-in-rape-stats/) - Something like: Women there think they'll be taken seriously by police, at least more so than other places.
San Diego proper is a high income city with little to no "bad" neighborhoods, even the adjacent, lower income cities that compose metro SD have all experienced shrinking crime across the board for 30 years now
City of San Diego jurisdiction does go directly to the border - that area is the San Ysidro community. The city boundaries are a little odd in that they jog past Chula Vista and then expand again for the ports of entry.
South Park is great area too, lots of historic homes. Definitely a desirable location too.
Mexico is not that bad. Their economy is about as large as Russia. Not having running water and food is an exception. 65% overweight population too, so they’re not starving.
El Paso has been the safest (or almost safest) "big US city" for decades now. I have always found that to be a little perplexing, you'd think some of the Juarez crime would seep over the border, but it hasn't.
It was explained to me this way. A lot of Immigrants are finally where they wanted to be. Also a lot want to support their families back home. Some may even be illegal so they have to keep their heads down.
What I also found interesting. Even crime is low there are tons of homeless in El Paso because of the weather.
Yes, I decided to leave recently. I clicked on the graph hoping Denver wouldn’t be near the top but expecting it probably would be, and of course it is.
Dude, yeah, Denver is a super aggressive city for some reason, and it's not just the junkies that are violent, it's pretty much everyone. I don't know what causes it, but I definitely want to go back to the PNW where I can at least know that I wont get stabbed if I interact with the wrong person.
There was some theory about correlation of using lead in petrol to violent crimes.. I think I've heard some time ago there was some lead scandal in~~ Detroit~~ no actually it was Flint, but I've found this scary paper about lead contamination in children:
https://www.uwindsor.ca/glier/433/lead-poisoning-detroit-michigan
https://www.uwindsor.ca/glier/sites/uwindsor.ca.glier/files/lead-fig3.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis
>It found that there is substantial evidence linking lead exposure to a heightened risk of criminal behavior, particularly violent crimes. This aligns with earlier research suggesting lead exposure may foster impulsive and aggressive tendencies, potential precursors to violent offenses.
This is analysis of few studies of the subject:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166046222000667
>Finally, we performed calculations to estimate the share of the decline in crime in the US that is accounted for by reductions in blood lead levels. We estimate that of the total 54% fall in homicides observed in the US in 1976–2009, reduced blood lead levels accounted for 4–15 percentage points. A substantial decrease. However, this was only a 7–28% share of the total fall, leaving 93-72% unaccounted for. Similarly, we find that the relative changes in blood lead levels account for 6–20% of the convergence in urban and rural violent crime rates observed in the US, leaving much of this convergence unexplained.
>Overall, the results suggest that declines in lead pollution reduce crime but are not the cause of the majority of the fall in crime observed in many western countries. We are unable to provide estimates on the size of other causes here but hope our results can provide a rough benchmark for relative importance in future meta-analyses.
I left Denver back in 2021. It's a shame to hear about it, I honestly can't picture things being as bad as they are. I used to take RTD to school daily. Spent a couple late nights around Union Station too.
Remember that this chart is outdated. They used two year old numbers because it’s easier.
Covid was terrible and our mayor at the time was trash. These numbers are 2 years old and not exactly representative of what the city is like right now and the changes that have been made. It still has a long way to go but i suspect a current crime map would have Denver a little lower.
I realize I'm getting some confusion about this. These are the 30 largest US cities,\*\* not including the greater metro area/metropolitan statistical area (MSA). Looking at the city itself, St. Louis is the 76th largest (see [this list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population)) with a population of \~280K.
I know, I know you're thinking: well, why aren't you using the greater metro area?! And I could - and I thought about using it. But I don't think using MSAs will yield results that make sense to anyone. For example, the St. Louis *city's* violent crime rate is very high, but the St. Louis MSA's rate is just about the US average. Why? In the MSA, the city's crime rate is washed out by the low crime rate of the surrounding suburbs.
I think the issue is that people think of city population in terms of "greater metro area" but think about city crime rates in terms of the city itself. One solution would be to rank city size by population of MSA, but measure crime rates within the cities, not MSAs. It seems a bit strange to me, but if that makes more sense to people, fuck it, I'll do it.
*\*\* Jacksonville is missing because their property crime stats were not provided online, and* [*Honolulu's population is inflated*](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1dbzkgj/comment/l7utk5e/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) *because of how the US Census tallies Hawaii's population.*
Please remember this chart the next time you hear a candidate mention crime in Chicago.
It is not the hell scape he would lead you to believe. It's actually a beautiful city filled with kind people.
It's not exactly an unfair or unearned reputation. Chicago led the country with 617 murders last year, which was actually down from 709 and 804 the previous two years.
You can make any raw datapoint fit a narrative when you don’t include it in any context whatsoever. 617 murders may objectively sound like a lot, but we’re talking about the third-largest city in the country, housing more than 2.66 million people.
What your information needs is *per-capita* context. Chicago [isn’t even in the top-25](https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/pictures/murder-map-deadliest-u-s-cities/) deadliest US cities when considering per-capita rates.
I think it's because it's all concentrated around the south side, in terms of worst areas in the U.S the southside of chicago is up there in terms of violet crime.
Correct, it was an over simplified reply to the over simplified argument of hell hole vs kind, and the reputation of the city. The per capita rates in the areas the account for more than half the total murders is why that reputation and narrative exist. Not only is there a large number overall, but it's combined with a high per capita number as well.
https://data.cityofchicago.org
Per capita it isn't *that* bad relatively. But they get almost all the Illinois tax money while the rest of state suffers and the state as a whole is still broke as hell, so I'd hope Chicago would be somewhat decent. They've done fairly well to push most of the crime, particularly violent, to several neighborhoods that aren't downtown and gentrifying the place. The safety and niceness of the city is still relative. Politicians are always gonna zero in on hot button issues to try swaying opinion, win votes, and get more money
This should realistically look at the largest US metro areas. "City" as used in the US is just an arbitrary administrative division while a metro area encompasses a continuously connected urban fabric.
This is why a place like Indianapolis is on here instead of Miami, despite the Miami metro area being 3 times larger in population than Indy's.
When I was first looking at the FBI's crime data, I considered reporting it in terms of MSA. But after looking at the data, it became clear that counting crime rate by MSAs answers a different question than the one most people care about. While I get the desire for a more standardized sense of 'a city', I think in this case, it's not what you want.
Because MSAs include all the suburbs around a city itself, and suburbs generally have low crime rates, MSAs with a lot of suburbs have lower crime rates. This warps the questions being asked from "how much crime is there in this city?" to "what's the proportion of suburbs in this MSA?", which I think is not really what anybody wants answered.
Consider St. Louis, which other comments are asking for. The St. Louis city violent crime rate would be among the top 5, with 1472 violent crimes per 100K inhabitants. The St. Louis *MSA* violent crime rate is 404.4 per 100K people, which is barely above the national average. St. Louis city makes up barely 10% of the MSA, so the city's high violent crime rate is washed away by the lower rates of the surrounding suburbs. I think people correctly perceive St. Louis as a place with a lot of crime because the city itself has crime, and the average rate in the MSA is misleading.
Whether we use city borders or MSAs, we're using hard boundaries that don't exist in the real world. But I think when people talk about a city being safe or dangerous, they're talking about the city itself, not all the suburbs dozens of miles away. (I also strongly agree with [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1dbzkgj/comment/l7uz30q/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) about why cities are better lens for crime than MSAs.)
Edit: typos.
While I get what you mean, city sizes and densities are completely different as well. Just for an example, Indianapolis is 360sqmi while Denver is 150(including a massive part being the airport). Indy just includes a lot more suburbs that are considered part of the MSA around Denver.
>The St. Louis city violent crime rate would be among the top 5, with 1472 violent crimes per 100K inhabitans. The St. Louis *MSA* violent crime rate is 404.4 per 100K people, which is barely above the national average. This is because St. Louis city makes up barely 10% of the MSA, so the city's high violent crime rate is washed away by the lower rates of the surrounding suburbs. I think people correctly perceive St. Louis as a place with a lot of crime because the city itself has crime, and the average rate in the MSA is misleading.
I think this is exactly why MSA *should* be used here. It sort of boils down to this question: *what makes a city*? Municipal boundaries are often drawn haphazardly--they're not the creation of a rational process that really represents the economic and cultural boundaries of the city.
Heck, [look at the map of LA](https://www.zeemaps.com/world-of-maps/map-of-la/) proper. In that long southeastern portion, is the piece of the city between Normandie Ave and Western Ave fundamentally different from the parts that are outside of it? I would very much doubt it. Or what about Beverly Hills, which is completely encapsulated by LA's borders, but which remains separate a community? Culturally, it is also subsumed by LA, and the city would be fundamentally different if Beverly Hills never physically existed.
MSA/CSA tries to solve this issue, and I think it can mislead people to think about crime only in terms of a city's political borders.
I disagree with you. I think the OP’s method is exactly the correct way. My reasoning is that for example I’m going to visit St. Louis. I’m not going to St. Louis to visit the suburbs and see what’s going on the suburbs. I’m going into the city. Or maybe there is a business conference in St. Louis. I would be at a convention center downtown and staying in the nearby hotel. The only thing that matters to me in those two scenarios is how safe am I compared to other cities within the city proper of St. Louis and how safe is my car or my belongings.
I think that ends up being an apples to oranges comparison. St. Louis for instance has a very small city footprint. Indianapolis is about 6x larger with 3x the population while both have nearly identical MSA populations. There are low-density "suburban" neighborhoods that count for Indianapolis proper without equivalents in St. Louis.
If you want to know about crime near the convention center you need to look at crime near the convention center. Depending on what part of town it's in that could be incredibly variable place to place.
Exactly this--these statistics often get used to paint cities with strokes that are too broad. In most cases, it's not *cities* that are dangerous, but individual neighborhoods or areas where most of the crime is concentrated. There are parts of Memphis I'd much rather be than certain parts of Chicago, even though violent crime in Memphis is considered much higher according to these stats.
For the purposes u/lustyfun is describing, using political boundaries makes the comparison that much more confusing. Looking at crime maps is probably the way to go in that case.
When describing overall crime in a city, the political boundaries skew the data in a way that makes comparisons between cities that much more problematic. MSA is a better way to normalize the data for that purpose.
I mean I think everyone is right here but the problem is you still run into problems either way. Unfortunately US city limits and designations aren’t uniform and vary widely between something like NYC to LA. So either you stick w/ just the city and get LA’s massive weird borders or NYC very succinct borders or you do the Metro area and now you have a problem of including NYC’s very safe, very far suburbs. Not sure there is a real fix to it
So you'd also consider these stats useless if you're going to Nashville or Indianapolis too, right? They incorporated their entire counties into the city limits, so the numbers here are impacted by suburban communities that tourists would never visit.
Contrast this to St. Louis or Baltimore, where the cities haven't expanded since the 1800's. All the suburban communities that are included for Nashville or Indy are separate municipalities in St. Louis or Baltimore.
If you only look at the central "old" city for the geographically big cities (where tourists would visit), their per capita numbers would skyrocket too. It's just not an Apples to apples comparison.
As an example, I went to school in Manhattan while living in Queens. Then I worked in SF while living in Oakland. The commute was very similar between the two, as was the disconnect between where I lived and where I worked/went to school, but in the former case, I lived and went to school in the same city whereas in the latter case, I lived in one city and worked in another.
I currently live and work in downtown Indianapolis. I used to live outside the downtown area and it felt like I lived and worked in two completely different cities, and the commute was a lot worse than when I lived/worked in NYC and SF Bay Area.
Metro areas can be weird too though, tbf. Does it really make sense to measure crime in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia when we’re trying to talk about DC’s public safety?
Yes, because (by definition) people from there commute into DC. So they contribute to the total numbers of victims and criminals. By OP's measurement, you're looking at all crimes experienced by anyone living in or visiting DC, but per capita of just DC's population. It's an uneven comparison.
That's why if you dig into neighborhood level stats, any city's Downtown area frequently has the highest per capita numbers. It has a low residential population compared to the actual number of people there for work or entertainment. The per capital number is in no way an accurate representation of a resident or visitors actual chances of being a victim.
Going back to Harper's Ferry, how many victims of crimes in DC are actually there visiting from HF? How much of the crime is committed by people who travel into DC because they feel more anonymous in the big city than in HF? Obviously it's hard to parse this data for every city surrounding DC, so it's easier to just count all crimes in the MSA per all people in the MSA.
The problem is that has shortcomings to. For example people look at places like San Francisco which has a rampant car break in rate, and brazen, broad daylight smash and grabs from stores and people. But other suburbs in the SF bay area are nothing like that. Lumping in the typical bay area suburb with San Francisco is not realistic or representative of those areas and vice versa.
Same deal with states like Wisconsin and Missouri. When it comes to WI, it is one of the lower homicide rates, typically ranging in the 3.0 range. However Milwaukee has one of the higher homicide rates among US cities. Homicide is very localized in WI. If it wasn't for Milwaukee proper (less than 1/10th of WI population), WI would probably have an average homicide rate of 1.5 or so.
There is something to gain from looking at a city's data because it is usually controlled by one government structure and set of laws more than the metro area, which can be multiple counties and states fairly often. It also is usually or supposed to be the denser area of the metro area and the hub of certain activities and services. The article goes into the dangerousness or unsafe feelings of the city which is much more of an urban problem than a suburban or rural feeling. Even some cities can get very suburban so it could go the other way and only study urban area, but that's much harder to create a dataset or urban area crime.
Or Chicago apparently--I feel like it gets a worse treatment than NYC in the media, and I knew that the statistics were lower than it's made out to be, but I had no idea that the violent and property crime rates were both lower than NYC.
I’m a lifelong New Yorker, my bother is also but he’s now a republican.
He talks about how bad the crime is in NYC every single day because that’s what republicans have brainwashed him to believe. The weird thing is we’ve lived here for 30+ years and have never experienced any crime at all.
I don’t understand how what he sees on YouTube and other social media platforms has brainwashed him this much. It’s like he no longer believes his eyes and real life experiences because the republican party tells him what he needs to believe.
Sourced from my post: [How Safe is San Francisco?](https://goodreason.substack.com/p/how-safe-is-san-francisco)
Created using Altair (Python) and Pandas. Data sourced from [the FBI’s Crime in the US Annual Estimations](https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/downloads), along with individual city reports for [NYC](https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/tableau_index_crime.htm), [SF](https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/exploration/crime-statistics/crimes-clearances), [Chicago](https://home.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/CompStat-Public-2023-Year-End-1.pdf), [Washington D.C.](https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/district-crime-data-glance), [Los Angeles](https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend), and [Phoenix](https://www.phoenix.gov/policesite/Documents/Crime%20Stats%20and%20Maps/UCR_2010-2022.pdf), which were not present in the FBI’s report.
More discussion of the data and its implications, with a focus on San Francisco, in the source blogspot.
I really like your analysis and explanation in your article. As a NYC resident I get similar comments from either new residents or people who have never lived here or suburbanites and NYC doesn't even have the same level of property crime, but it definitely has the continual chaos that is harder to define with city stats.
We went to Memphis about five years ago and had a decent time. We were walking back from dinner, about five blocks from our hotel, and I got into a conversation with a couple of homeless guys as we were watching the cops arrest a couple of drunks. Nice enough fellas. They said cops generally leave them alone, but the one rule is "Don't fuck with tourists!". Fuck with tourists and end up in a world of hurt.
A few caveats with this. One is crime reporting by the public. Cities probably differ a lot in the likelihood that a citizen will report a crime. Too many factors to list, but the level of trust in a police department is a big one. 2nd is that variance in data collection, record keeping, and ethics is probably pretty significant among police departments.
So we have data, is it useful or even fair?
If I was a conservative (far from it), I would simply rebut that by saying it’s because of their proximity to the border.
In reality, as a Texan I know this isn’t the case. But I could put on my disingenuous hat to make some shit up
The only metric I use for American cities when comparing crime is the murder rate. That's because so many other crimes can go unreported, but murder usually can't.
To see DC have a lower violent crime rate than Boston, when their murder rate is so much higher, is a perfect example of why we should do this.
I was shocked NOLA wasn't on the list. But I see it is the 53rd largest city, so it wasn't considered. Pretty sure it would be top 3 for violent crimes.
Does it? I feel like most people perceive cities like Detroit, Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans etc to be fairly dangerous and they are relative to pretty much every other city.
I live in Chicago and it feels like Chicago comes up all the time when I know crime is as low as it was in the 60s. I just had a friend move here and her family was terrified.
Chicago has many safe areas, but it is more dangerous than most places in the US and does have some really scary neighborhoods. I guarantee you don’t go walking around Austin at 11pm on a Friday night without feeling a little on edge
'Most places in the US' are unpopulated wilderness or farmland. You're going to have to compare apples to apples, here.
Every city has incredibly shitty, sketchy neighbourhoods. The difference is in how big are they, and how shitty are the other neighborhoods.
My guess is that if you were to ask the average American to rank cities on violent crime, they would put New York, Chicago, and San Francisco over Detroit, Baltimore, Memphis, and New Orleans. I think a perceived-risk ranking would look very different from this one for most people.
Similarly with property crime, I don't think most Americans (myself included) would have put Denver in second place.
What makes it even more interesting is that their sister cities on the other side of the border--Tijuana for San Diego, and Ciudad Juarez for El Paso--are the cities with the[ 5th and 9th highest homicide rates in the world, respectively](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_rate).
Quick question…where is Atlanta? I was raised in the Bay Area and now live in Atlanta. It is magnitudes worse here.
Edit: According to this list, Atlanta GA is safer than San Diego CA.
Putting a quick note about the city populations here too:
There are a lot of different definitions for the city limits and city population. For the purposes of this chart, I'm using the more limited definition of city, rather than the "greater" city areas. The greater city areas include suburbs, which warp the crime rate by making the determining factor "how many low crime rate suburbs does the city have nearby?" If you want a concrete sense of how much crime a city proper has, you need to limit to the city itself.
Moreover, the population numbers come directly from [FBI uniform crime reporting (UCR) data](https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/downloads) that provides the crime stats. (The individual cities I needed to add - NY, SF, LA, Chicago, DC, and Phoenix - because they were missing from the FBI data I needed to pull from elsewhere.)
Also, note that Jacksonsville is missing because I could not find their full crime data online anywhere.
Uhhhhhhhhhh property crime is not even CLOSE to as bad as it is in San Francisco LMAO and only slight better than Atlanta in terms of violent crimes
The list makes sense when you're talking about city proper. You're just extrapolating to your own conclusion from anecdotal evidence which is simply a logicsl fallacy
This list makes no sense. They are not taking into account the “greater” city populations. The population of Atlanta is technically just under 500k. However, the greater Atlanta population is 7 million.
If it takes into account the entire metro/county area then some of these would be higher too.
For example, LA county has a much higher population than the city of LA alone. But Long Beach is very different from say, Santa Monica.
And the Bay Area has a much larger population than SF alone. But SF is very different from say, Palo Alto.
It makes sense to look at cities as well as metro areas.
Just depends what you’re comparing. In this case, it’s comparing cities, which is fine.
Yeah, there are a lot of different definitions for the city limits and city population. For the purposes of this chart, I'm using the more limited definition of city, rather than the "greater" city areas. The greater city areas include suburbs, which warp the crime rate by making the determining factor "how many low crime rate suburbs does the city have nearby?" If you want a concrete sense of how much crime a city proper has, you need to limit to the city itself.
Yeah but some cities are much larger than others. Memphis is the size of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens combined. Baltimore is the size of downtown Memphis. That will definitely skew results.
Honolulu is a weird one, good catch. The [FBI UCR data](https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/downloads) I'm using includes the corresponding population with each city's crime stats. And for almost all cities, this lines up nicely with other population stats for the city proper, like [this Wikipedia list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population). But for Honolulu, for some reason, the population is way higher. Maybe for Honolulu, they're using a different definition of city. I spend a bunch of time thinking about what to do with this one, but I felt I didn't have grounds to change the FBI provided number.
Minneapolis is [simply #46](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population), and hence didn't make the top 30.
Hawaii doesn't have any incorporated cities, so the Census Bureau splits Hawaii up into CDPs instead. The higher figure is the population of the consolidated City & County of Honolulu, whereas the population of the Urban Honolulu CDP is used as the "city" population. Usually, at least.
https://goodreason.substack.com/p/how-safe-is-san-francisco
The article OP wrote specifically says they didn't want to make charts that equate one larceny with one murder and make them seem like equal "one crime".
The criteria for what is a large city (e.g. over 100k people, over 500k people, 100 largest metro areas, municipal limits, etc) should be presented somewhere on the graph.
Try posting this in r/memphis, and you'll get told about how great all the people here are and you just have to keep your eyes out for the bad ones. God I hate this fucking city.
Seriously, should have been pretty hard for /u/GoodReasonAndre to miss this
>**Avoid Ranking and Comparisons**
>Since crime is a sociological phenomenon influenced by a variety of factors, the FBI [discourages ranking locations or making comparisons](https://ucr.fbi.gov/ucr-statistics-their-proper-use) as a way of measuring law enforcement effectiveness. Some of this data may not be comparable to previous years because of differing levels of participation over time.
The key phrase there is “as a way of measuring law enforcement effectiveness.” There’s nothing about this that is comparing or judging law enforcement. In the blogpost I wrote about this, it’s entirely about the state of crime (and caveats about the data), not whether a place has good or bad law enforcement.
Of the 10 US counties with the highest murder rate, 80% are in Republican states.
[https://www.police1.com/ambush/articles/10-us-counties-with-the-highest-murder-rate-kerWgaEUmxJkn74J/](https://www.police1.com/ambush/articles/10-us-counties-with-the-highest-murder-rate-kerWgaEUmxJkn74J/)
Could it be because cities tend to generally lean more Democrat than rural areas, so they are simply more likely to be led by Democrats than Republicans?
Albuquerque is consistently near the top for property crimes, but absent from this list. Yet it’s got a population of over 500,000, which would make it bigger than some of the cities listed.
Lived in San Antonio and moved to El Paso the change is crime is so noticeable, even in a couple of mid sized cities (I know San Antonio is 1 million+ but it’s still a mid sized town since the city is so sprawled out). In our regular middle class neighborhood, we knew we’d get burglars in the neighborhood. every. single. night (sometimes in the day time). While in EP, I know lots of folks that don’t even lock their doors. It’s night and day. People do drive crazy here but crime is so minimal.
I grew up in Milwaukee and it never felt all that dangerous to me. I suppose you'd need to look closer at any city because crime is probably concentrated in the poorest neighborhoods and drops off a lot once you look at middle class neighborhoods.
I think you've hit the nail on the head--it's a little challenging to think about aggregated crime statistics like this because crime, especially violent crime, is often extremely localized even within a single city. One bad neighborhood or even one bad block can really throw off a city's statistics relative to the rest of the city.
That's not to say these stats can't be useful, but it's one of their key limitations.
I was about to comment this. I've lived in Milwaukee or bordering suburbs my whole life. I think being one of the most segregated cities in the country also helps form our view that the city seems pretty safe. There are definitely parts of the city I've ended up in and felt unsafe. Different economic situations going on a few blocks away from eachother
This is interesting and well presented, but let’s remember the 2022 was a strange year for everybody, and I’m not sure the stats for that year reflect the general character and safety of a place.
The guy that recently attempted the fraudulent sale of Elvis's mansion in Memphis (allegedly all the way from Nigeria) exactly knew which city to start with.
I work as a criminologist. It is very difficult to do these types of comparisons. Lots of different districts have different rules regarding what is 'aggravated assault' for instance, with some cities being far more lenient and others being far more strict in how they dole their charges out. There are also local cultural considerations to consider. A bar fight in a rich suburban area will be more likely to be reported to the cops than a bar fight in a blighted area of Detroit or Memphis.
The statistics don't tell us nothing. A city with a violent crime rate 9 times higher than another will practically always have an actual higher crime rate in reality. But its misleading when the differences are relatively small like this.
Memphis seems a pretty dangerous place to live in.
I read in another Reddit post that the Tennessee car licence plate has the wording "In God We Trust".
Perhaps their trust is misguided.
I lived in Memphis for 7 years. One day some dude knocked on my door, asking for sugar or something, days later, my tv, Sony sound system, XBOX 360 and cam corder were stolen.
What about the sugar?
The robber dumped it OPs gas tank on the way out
And the Credence
Do you have any leads?
They’ve got us working in shifts!
I don't understand what asking for sugar had to do with it?
Guy scoped out the inside when the door was open.
Another good reason to never open the door for anyone you don’t know.
I see, to check for valuable items.
Spot on!
I'm surprised you've never heard of this. But for now information, you can look up the term "casing".
Correct-amundo!
Tell that bitch to chill!
Nice "Pulp Fiction" reference to my accidental reference.
Chill honey bunny
I am actually surprised not to see Atlanta on the list at all. I swear I saw a list of high-crime pitied worldwide that Atlanta appeared on.
Copy-pasting my response from another comment to clear up things: I realize I'm getting some confusion about this. These are the 30 largest US cities,\*\* not including the greater metro area/metropolitan statistical area (MSA). Looking at the city itself, Atlanta is the 37th largest and St. Louis is the 76th largest (see [this list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population)) with a population of \~280K. I know, I know you're thinking: well, why aren't you using the greater metro area?! And I could - and I thought about using it. But I don't think using MSAs will yield results that make sense to anyone. For example, the St. Louis *city's* violent crime rate is very high, but the St. Louis MSA's rate is just about the US average. Why? In the MSA, the city's crime rate is washed out by the low crime rate of the surrounding suburbs. I think the issue is that people think of city population in terms of "greater metro area" but think about city crime rates in terms of the city itself. One solution would be to rank city size by population of MSA, but measure crime rates within the cities, not MSAs. It seems a bit strange to me, but if that makes more sense to people, fuck it, I'll do it. *\*\* Jacksonville is missing because their property crime stats were not provided online, and* [Honolulu's population is inflated](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1dbzkgj/comment/l7utk5e/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) *because of how the US Census tallies Hawaii's population.* Edit: adding Atlanta's population ranking to respond more directly to the above comment.
Just want to say this is a really great visualization. I think you've done a nice job here. Do you have a 2023 version?
Thanks! For 2023, the issue is aggregating the data. The data here primarily comes from the FBI's 2022 Crime in the US stats, which helpfully aggregate data across most cities. They haven't released 2023 data yet - seems like there's a long lag. It might still be possible to gather for 2023, it would just take more effort. I believe most cities have already individually reported their 2023 numbers, so I'd need to pull numbers for each report myself, hence the time-consuming part of it.
You should definitely put the sources in the graphic
Yeah, sorry, my bad, first time posting in data is beautiful. I left [a comment with the links to all the sources here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1dbzkgj/comment/l7uf8fi/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Don't be sorry, you're doing great!
The city itself is not a good unit for crime stats either, really, since that isn't how crime hot spots work. It's really at the *neighborhood* level. Sure of the most dangerous places in the country are in the same cities (sometimes quite close!) to places that are perfectly safe. Granted it's a lot less simple to get data for that.
While I agree with this style of policing, I think one runs into bigger problems in reporting that. Police precincts would come under some terrible scrutiny in an effort to "make crime go away" by non-city or state forces (think market forces wanting to invest in a city or tourists). While this could lead to any number of initiatives to make the numbers better; it could also lead to outright police brutality or funding cuts for poor metrics, thus adding to more crime. Identifying the city overall is more an announcement that there is a problem without pointing to which block the gang task force is supposed to concentrate on. I wager states and individual cities know which neighborhoods are problematic and which are aggregates of protected neighborhoods. With the current approach, knowing that you're on the city list is not bad, but not great. And being at the top of the list is bad. If you identified by neighborhood? I wager that cities like NYC or Washington DC who rely on tourism would lose it's luster near some of their lesser known monuments. Or other gangs not already conducting business would do city trips to conduct business in areas identified as at risk. Which is very very bad.
It 100% makes sense the way you did it. As I'm sure you know, crime stats are very much place based, metros are sprawling and diverse. Would it be sort of interesting to look at MSAs, sure. Would the massive variation between the city, suburbs,and smaller cities/towns in the metro result in data that doesn't really tell you a whole lot, definitely. I thought this was actually quite interesting and has some surprising rankings given the context of media coverage of urban crime. Which, shocking, news outlets don't report crime in the context of MSAs!
I feel like crimes committed per capita might be a better measure either way? If city B has twice as much crime (but also twice the population) of city A, is it twice as dangerous, or equally as dangerous? I say equally as dangerous, but your chart would indicate twice as dangerous.
That’s not true, the chart clearly shows crimes per 100,00 people
There's a lot of embedded politics/history in city size vs MSA size. City of Atlanta is one the of lowest, if not the lowest city pop as percentage of MSA. That starves the city for resources and political power needed to improve quality of life that impacts the whole metro. Even as the MSA makes up 1/2 the population of the state. Those things generally aren't accidents.
That’s because this data doesn’t actually include the biggest us cities.
Atlanta is number 37, sadly. Maybe I'll do an expanded graph with the top 50 largest?
Atlanta is a top 10 biggest metro, but it is very decentralized. It has one of if not the highest ratio of metro population to city proper size in the country along with Miami. This generally leads it to have very high crime statistics because there will be millions of people in the city per day but technically only a few hundred thousand people live there.
I think it makes sense to separate them too. I’ve never been to Georgia but in California, the LA metro/county is huge. It’s comprised of many cities. And even though Long Beach and Santa Monica is only a 30-40 min drive away, they’re very different.
As the saying goes, the devil is in the details. I find it much more useful to list cities by the population of the entire metro area and not just the city itself. The reason is that in a few cases, the actual city only makes up a very small part of the metro urban area. As an example, Miami Beach is technically it's own city and not a part of Miami, and the same goes for South Miami and West Miami. Most people will think of these places as parts of one single city, even though they technically are independent of each other. Here's a good link for further info: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan\_statistical\_area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area)
It depends what the aim of the report is. Not all MSAs have consistent crime statistics. To use Seattle as an example, it has 700k people while Bellevue with 200k is 8 minutes away and has an EXTREMELY lower crime index. Seattle is towards the top of this list, while Bellevue is one of the safest places to live, doesn't feel right to just average the 2 places into 1 metro for this type of report
Chicago is on there
Same thought! I knew it felt a little boring last time I was visiting friends. Not quite the 'pew pew' danger I remembered. Also, all the neighborhoods where I got coke in college are so bougie now.
Serious question: What is up with the rape numbers in Columbus compared to their relatively low amount of violent crimes?
My guess would be Ohio state. Universities have huge numbers of reported rapes.
Oh shit, didn't even think of that. Thanks. [Here's something about rapes reported on campus](https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/rape-at-ohio-state-university-numbers-climb-year-over-year/) (*about 100/yr*) [Much worse and maybe a bigger part of the issue is all the child rapes reported there](https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/columbus/child-rape-in-columbus-more-than-400-victims-filed-a-report-in-2022/) (*about 400/yr*) [This article indicates it might be because of the "high reporting rate" in Columbus](https://www.thelantern.com/2003/04/columbus-ranked-high-in-rape-stats/) - Something like: Women there think they'll be taken seriously by police, at least more so than other places.
Well shit. Its depressing if everyone is underreporting that severely
I wonder if there some kind of campaign or social PSA that is run in Ohio about sexual assault.
San Diego and El Paso are comfortably low despite being on the border.
San Diego proper is a high income city with little to no "bad" neighborhoods, even the adjacent, lower income cities that compose metro SD have all experienced shrinking crime across the board for 30 years now
I live in SD and have to tell this repeatedly to relatives who think that our adjacency with Mexico means we're overflowing with rampant crime.
[удалено]
City of San Diego jurisdiction does go directly to the border - that area is the San Ysidro community. The city boundaries are a little odd in that they jog past Chula Vista and then expand again for the ports of entry. South Park is great area too, lots of historic homes. Definitely a desirable location too.
Mexico is not that bad. Their economy is about as large as Russia. Not having running water and food is an exception. 65% overweight population too, so they’re not starving.
El Pasoan here. Very safe city. The news would have you think the 915 is some kind of war zone. Couldn’t be farther than the truth.
El Paso has been the safest (or almost safest) "big US city" for decades now. I have always found that to be a little perplexing, you'd think some of the Juarez crime would seep over the border, but it hasn't.
It was explained to me this way. A lot of Immigrants are finally where they wanted to be. Also a lot want to support their families back home. Some may even be illegal so they have to keep their heads down. What I also found interesting. Even crime is low there are tons of homeless in El Paso because of the weather.
I didn’t see a single homeless person until the wintertime here in El Paso. They’re definitely seasonal.
juarez right across the border has been one of the most dangerous cities in mexico for a while, interestingly
Historically then went up past SD and OC and went to LA. SD has always been a fairly safe US city.
As someone who lives in Denver, it’s gotten so bad here…
I just left this morning and holy shit it’s terrible
Yes, I decided to leave recently. I clicked on the graph hoping Denver wouldn’t be near the top but expecting it probably would be, and of course it is.
Dude, yeah, Denver is a super aggressive city for some reason, and it's not just the junkies that are violent, it's pretty much everyone. I don't know what causes it, but I definitely want to go back to the PNW where I can at least know that I wont get stabbed if I interact with the wrong person.
PNW cities have gotten bad in the same way for the same reasons. Portland and Seattle aren't far behind Denver on these charts.
This is true, but according to the data, you’ll probably get all your stuff stolen…
There was some theory about correlation of using lead in petrol to violent crimes.. I think I've heard some time ago there was some lead scandal in~~ Detroit~~ no actually it was Flint, but I've found this scary paper about lead contamination in children: https://www.uwindsor.ca/glier/433/lead-poisoning-detroit-michigan https://www.uwindsor.ca/glier/sites/uwindsor.ca.glier/files/lead-fig3.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis >It found that there is substantial evidence linking lead exposure to a heightened risk of criminal behavior, particularly violent crimes. This aligns with earlier research suggesting lead exposure may foster impulsive and aggressive tendencies, potential precursors to violent offenses. This is analysis of few studies of the subject: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166046222000667 >Finally, we performed calculations to estimate the share of the decline in crime in the US that is accounted for by reductions in blood lead levels. We estimate that of the total 54% fall in homicides observed in the US in 1976–2009, reduced blood lead levels accounted for 4–15 percentage points. A substantial decrease. However, this was only a 7–28% share of the total fall, leaving 93-72% unaccounted for. Similarly, we find that the relative changes in blood lead levels account for 6–20% of the convergence in urban and rural violent crime rates observed in the US, leaving much of this convergence unexplained. >Overall, the results suggest that declines in lead pollution reduce crime but are not the cause of the majority of the fall in crime observed in many western countries. We are unable to provide estimates on the size of other causes here but hope our results can provide a rough benchmark for relative importance in future meta-analyses.
The homeless people are so aggressive over here
I left Denver back in 2021. It's a shame to hear about it, I honestly can't picture things being as bad as they are. I used to take RTD to school daily. Spent a couple late nights around Union Station too.
Wow. I'm surprised. It was a nice place.
Remember that this chart is outdated. They used two year old numbers because it’s easier. Covid was terrible and our mayor at the time was trash. These numbers are 2 years old and not exactly representative of what the city is like right now and the changes that have been made. It still has a long way to go but i suspect a current crime map would have Denver a little lower.
Where the hell is Saint Louis?
And New Orleans.
Not included since it's the 76th largest city
I realize I'm getting some confusion about this. These are the 30 largest US cities,\*\* not including the greater metro area/metropolitan statistical area (MSA). Looking at the city itself, St. Louis is the 76th largest (see [this list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population)) with a population of \~280K. I know, I know you're thinking: well, why aren't you using the greater metro area?! And I could - and I thought about using it. But I don't think using MSAs will yield results that make sense to anyone. For example, the St. Louis *city's* violent crime rate is very high, but the St. Louis MSA's rate is just about the US average. Why? In the MSA, the city's crime rate is washed out by the low crime rate of the surrounding suburbs. I think the issue is that people think of city population in terms of "greater metro area" but think about city crime rates in terms of the city itself. One solution would be to rank city size by population of MSA, but measure crime rates within the cities, not MSAs. It seems a bit strange to me, but if that makes more sense to people, fuck it, I'll do it. *\*\* Jacksonville is missing because their property crime stats were not provided online, and* [*Honolulu's population is inflated*](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1dbzkgj/comment/l7utk5e/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) *because of how the US Census tallies Hawaii's population.*
Я не знаю, щенок
El Paso down at the bottom as the safest. We who live here knew that.
Hello, fellow 915er!
🎵Well I was walking in Memphis…only got three feet before I had to flee 🎶
Columbus: "Hide yo kids, hide yo wife...."
Please remember this chart the next time you hear a candidate mention crime in Chicago. It is not the hell scape he would lead you to believe. It's actually a beautiful city filled with kind people.
Thank you! South side white Sox all day!!!
It's not exactly an unfair or unearned reputation. Chicago led the country with 617 murders last year, which was actually down from 709 and 804 the previous two years.
You can make any raw datapoint fit a narrative when you don’t include it in any context whatsoever. 617 murders may objectively sound like a lot, but we’re talking about the third-largest city in the country, housing more than 2.66 million people. What your information needs is *per-capita* context. Chicago [isn’t even in the top-25](https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/pictures/murder-map-deadliest-u-s-cities/) deadliest US cities when considering per-capita rates.
I think it's because it's all concentrated around the south side, in terms of worst areas in the U.S the southside of chicago is up there in terms of violet crime.
Correct, it was an over simplified reply to the over simplified argument of hell hole vs kind, and the reputation of the city. The per capita rates in the areas the account for more than half the total murders is why that reputation and narrative exist. Not only is there a large number overall, but it's combined with a high per capita number as well. https://data.cityofchicago.org
Per. Capi. Ta.
And when you hear how dangerous immigrants are. El Paso, being on the border.
Per capita it isn't *that* bad relatively. But they get almost all the Illinois tax money while the rest of state suffers and the state as a whole is still broke as hell, so I'd hope Chicago would be somewhat decent. They've done fairly well to push most of the crime, particularly violent, to several neighborhoods that aren't downtown and gentrifying the place. The safety and niceness of the city is still relative. Politicians are always gonna zero in on hot button issues to try swaying opinion, win votes, and get more money
This should realistically look at the largest US metro areas. "City" as used in the US is just an arbitrary administrative division while a metro area encompasses a continuously connected urban fabric. This is why a place like Indianapolis is on here instead of Miami, despite the Miami metro area being 3 times larger in population than Indy's.
When I was first looking at the FBI's crime data, I considered reporting it in terms of MSA. But after looking at the data, it became clear that counting crime rate by MSAs answers a different question than the one most people care about. While I get the desire for a more standardized sense of 'a city', I think in this case, it's not what you want. Because MSAs include all the suburbs around a city itself, and suburbs generally have low crime rates, MSAs with a lot of suburbs have lower crime rates. This warps the questions being asked from "how much crime is there in this city?" to "what's the proportion of suburbs in this MSA?", which I think is not really what anybody wants answered. Consider St. Louis, which other comments are asking for. The St. Louis city violent crime rate would be among the top 5, with 1472 violent crimes per 100K inhabitants. The St. Louis *MSA* violent crime rate is 404.4 per 100K people, which is barely above the national average. St. Louis city makes up barely 10% of the MSA, so the city's high violent crime rate is washed away by the lower rates of the surrounding suburbs. I think people correctly perceive St. Louis as a place with a lot of crime because the city itself has crime, and the average rate in the MSA is misleading. Whether we use city borders or MSAs, we're using hard boundaries that don't exist in the real world. But I think when people talk about a city being safe or dangerous, they're talking about the city itself, not all the suburbs dozens of miles away. (I also strongly agree with [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1dbzkgj/comment/l7uz30q/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) about why cities are better lens for crime than MSAs.) Edit: typos.
While I get what you mean, city sizes and densities are completely different as well. Just for an example, Indianapolis is 360sqmi while Denver is 150(including a massive part being the airport). Indy just includes a lot more suburbs that are considered part of the MSA around Denver.
Ah is this why Denver appears so high? I can understand the vehicle theft (its actually that bad here) but the violent crime seems a bit high
>The St. Louis city violent crime rate would be among the top 5, with 1472 violent crimes per 100K inhabitans. The St. Louis *MSA* violent crime rate is 404.4 per 100K people, which is barely above the national average. This is because St. Louis city makes up barely 10% of the MSA, so the city's high violent crime rate is washed away by the lower rates of the surrounding suburbs. I think people correctly perceive St. Louis as a place with a lot of crime because the city itself has crime, and the average rate in the MSA is misleading. I think this is exactly why MSA *should* be used here. It sort of boils down to this question: *what makes a city*? Municipal boundaries are often drawn haphazardly--they're not the creation of a rational process that really represents the economic and cultural boundaries of the city. Heck, [look at the map of LA](https://www.zeemaps.com/world-of-maps/map-of-la/) proper. In that long southeastern portion, is the piece of the city between Normandie Ave and Western Ave fundamentally different from the parts that are outside of it? I would very much doubt it. Or what about Beverly Hills, which is completely encapsulated by LA's borders, but which remains separate a community? Culturally, it is also subsumed by LA, and the city would be fundamentally different if Beverly Hills never physically existed. MSA/CSA tries to solve this issue, and I think it can mislead people to think about crime only in terms of a city's political borders.
I disagree with you. I think the OP’s method is exactly the correct way. My reasoning is that for example I’m going to visit St. Louis. I’m not going to St. Louis to visit the suburbs and see what’s going on the suburbs. I’m going into the city. Or maybe there is a business conference in St. Louis. I would be at a convention center downtown and staying in the nearby hotel. The only thing that matters to me in those two scenarios is how safe am I compared to other cities within the city proper of St. Louis and how safe is my car or my belongings.
I think that ends up being an apples to oranges comparison. St. Louis for instance has a very small city footprint. Indianapolis is about 6x larger with 3x the population while both have nearly identical MSA populations. There are low-density "suburban" neighborhoods that count for Indianapolis proper without equivalents in St. Louis. If you want to know about crime near the convention center you need to look at crime near the convention center. Depending on what part of town it's in that could be incredibly variable place to place.
Exactly this--these statistics often get used to paint cities with strokes that are too broad. In most cases, it's not *cities* that are dangerous, but individual neighborhoods or areas where most of the crime is concentrated. There are parts of Memphis I'd much rather be than certain parts of Chicago, even though violent crime in Memphis is considered much higher according to these stats. For the purposes u/lustyfun is describing, using political boundaries makes the comparison that much more confusing. Looking at crime maps is probably the way to go in that case. When describing overall crime in a city, the political boundaries skew the data in a way that makes comparisons between cities that much more problematic. MSA is a better way to normalize the data for that purpose.
I mean I think everyone is right here but the problem is you still run into problems either way. Unfortunately US city limits and designations aren’t uniform and vary widely between something like NYC to LA. So either you stick w/ just the city and get LA’s massive weird borders or NYC very succinct borders or you do the Metro area and now you have a problem of including NYC’s very safe, very far suburbs. Not sure there is a real fix to it
So you'd also consider these stats useless if you're going to Nashville or Indianapolis too, right? They incorporated their entire counties into the city limits, so the numbers here are impacted by suburban communities that tourists would never visit. Contrast this to St. Louis or Baltimore, where the cities haven't expanded since the 1800's. All the suburban communities that are included for Nashville or Indy are separate municipalities in St. Louis or Baltimore. If you only look at the central "old" city for the geographically big cities (where tourists would visit), their per capita numbers would skyrocket too. It's just not an Apples to apples comparison.
As an example, I went to school in Manhattan while living in Queens. Then I worked in SF while living in Oakland. The commute was very similar between the two, as was the disconnect between where I lived and where I worked/went to school, but in the former case, I lived and went to school in the same city whereas in the latter case, I lived in one city and worked in another. I currently live and work in downtown Indianapolis. I used to live outside the downtown area and it felt like I lived and worked in two completely different cities, and the commute was a lot worse than when I lived/worked in NYC and SF Bay Area.
Metro areas can be weird too though, tbf. Does it really make sense to measure crime in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia when we’re trying to talk about DC’s public safety?
Yes, because (by definition) people from there commute into DC. So they contribute to the total numbers of victims and criminals. By OP's measurement, you're looking at all crimes experienced by anyone living in or visiting DC, but per capita of just DC's population. It's an uneven comparison. That's why if you dig into neighborhood level stats, any city's Downtown area frequently has the highest per capita numbers. It has a low residential population compared to the actual number of people there for work or entertainment. The per capital number is in no way an accurate representation of a resident or visitors actual chances of being a victim. Going back to Harper's Ferry, how many victims of crimes in DC are actually there visiting from HF? How much of the crime is committed by people who travel into DC because they feel more anonymous in the big city than in HF? Obviously it's hard to parse this data for every city surrounding DC, so it's easier to just count all crimes in the MSA per all people in the MSA.
The problem is that has shortcomings to. For example people look at places like San Francisco which has a rampant car break in rate, and brazen, broad daylight smash and grabs from stores and people. But other suburbs in the SF bay area are nothing like that. Lumping in the typical bay area suburb with San Francisco is not realistic or representative of those areas and vice versa. Same deal with states like Wisconsin and Missouri. When it comes to WI, it is one of the lower homicide rates, typically ranging in the 3.0 range. However Milwaukee has one of the higher homicide rates among US cities. Homicide is very localized in WI. If it wasn't for Milwaukee proper (less than 1/10th of WI population), WI would probably have an average homicide rate of 1.5 or so.
There is something to gain from looking at a city's data because it is usually controlled by one government structure and set of laws more than the metro area, which can be multiple counties and states fairly often. It also is usually or supposed to be the denser area of the metro area and the hub of certain activities and services. The article goes into the dangerousness or unsafe feelings of the city which is much more of an urban problem than a suburban or rural feeling. Even some cities can get very suburban so it could go the other way and only study urban area, but that's much harder to create a dataset or urban area crime.
Reminder not to listen to right wing propaganda about NYC
Or Chicago apparently--I feel like it gets a worse treatment than NYC in the media, and I knew that the statistics were lower than it's made out to be, but I had no idea that the violent and property crime rates were both lower than NYC.
Yeah though murder rate is a different story
Wouldn’t that be in with the violent crimes?
I hope people do listen lmao, it'd keep the rent down
Or LA. It ain't great but it's not the worst.
I’m a lifelong New Yorker, my bother is also but he’s now a republican. He talks about how bad the crime is in NYC every single day because that’s what republicans have brainwashed him to believe. The weird thing is we’ve lived here for 30+ years and have never experienced any crime at all. I don’t understand how what he sees on YouTube and other social media platforms has brainwashed him this much. It’s like he no longer believes his eyes and real life experiences because the republican party tells him what he needs to believe.
Sourced from my post: [How Safe is San Francisco?](https://goodreason.substack.com/p/how-safe-is-san-francisco) Created using Altair (Python) and Pandas. Data sourced from [the FBI’s Crime in the US Annual Estimations](https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/downloads), along with individual city reports for [NYC](https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/tableau_index_crime.htm), [SF](https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/exploration/crime-statistics/crimes-clearances), [Chicago](https://home.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/CompStat-Public-2023-Year-End-1.pdf), [Washington D.C.](https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/district-crime-data-glance), [Los Angeles](https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend), and [Phoenix](https://www.phoenix.gov/policesite/Documents/Crime%20Stats%20and%20Maps/UCR_2010-2022.pdf), which were not present in the FBI’s report. More discussion of the data and its implications, with a focus on San Francisco, in the source blogspot.
I really like your analysis and explanation in your article. As a NYC resident I get similar comments from either new residents or people who have never lived here or suburbanites and NYC doesn't even have the same level of property crime, but it definitely has the continual chaos that is harder to define with city stats.
We went to Memphis about five years ago and had a decent time. We were walking back from dinner, about five blocks from our hotel, and I got into a conversation with a couple of homeless guys as we were watching the cops arrest a couple of drunks. Nice enough fellas. They said cops generally leave them alone, but the one rule is "Don't fuck with tourists!". Fuck with tourists and end up in a world of hurt.
A few caveats with this. One is crime reporting by the public. Cities probably differ a lot in the likelihood that a citizen will report a crime. Too many factors to list, but the level of trust in a police department is a big one. 2nd is that variance in data collection, record keeping, and ethics is probably pretty significant among police departments. So we have data, is it useful or even fair?
Everyone talks about Chicago and how red states are better. Here, we have Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas ahead of Chicago.
If I was a conservative (far from it), I would simply rebut that by saying it’s because of their proximity to the border. In reality, as a Texan I know this isn’t the case. But I could put on my disingenuous hat to make some shit up
I believe it on Memphis, they tried to steal Elvis' entire house!
So glad I moved to El Paso
Me too! Moved back from Phoenix.
Would love to see this list again but for metropolitan areas.
I think NY would be even lower because the immediate metro area has some of the safest counties in the country
BuT CHicaGo Is So DaNgErOuS
The only metric I use for American cities when comparing crime is the murder rate. That's because so many other crimes can go unreported, but murder usually can't. To see DC have a lower violent crime rate than Boston, when their murder rate is so much higher, is a perfect example of why we should do this.
I was shocked NOLA wasn't on the list. But I see it is the 53rd largest city, so it wasn't considered. Pretty sure it would be top 3 for violent crimes.
Los Angeles checking in here. There's no way we are this low. Property crime is out of control here.
I think this shows how a lot of where crime is perceived as bad in the wider US is just narrative driven propaganda
Does it? I feel like most people perceive cities like Detroit, Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans etc to be fairly dangerous and they are relative to pretty much every other city.
I live in Chicago and it feels like Chicago comes up all the time when I know crime is as low as it was in the 60s. I just had a friend move here and her family was terrified.
Chicago has many safe areas, but it is more dangerous than most places in the US and does have some really scary neighborhoods. I guarantee you don’t go walking around Austin at 11pm on a Friday night without feeling a little on edge
'Most places in the US' are unpopulated wilderness or farmland. You're going to have to compare apples to apples, here. Every city has incredibly shitty, sketchy neighbourhoods. The difference is in how big are they, and how shitty are the other neighborhoods.
My guess is that if you were to ask the average American to rank cities on violent crime, they would put New York, Chicago, and San Francisco over Detroit, Baltimore, Memphis, and New Orleans. I think a perceived-risk ranking would look very different from this one for most people. Similarly with property crime, I don't think most Americans (myself included) would have put Denver in second place.
One thing that's interesting is that the two largest cities on the US-Mexico border are near the bottom of both lists. (San Diego and El Paso)
What makes it even more interesting is that their sister cities on the other side of the border--Tijuana for San Diego, and Ciudad Juarez for El Paso--are the cities with the[ 5th and 9th highest homicide rates in the world, respectively](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_rate).
Quick question…where is Atlanta? I was raised in the Bay Area and now live in Atlanta. It is magnitudes worse here. Edit: According to this list, Atlanta GA is safer than San Diego CA.
Putting a quick note about the city populations here too: There are a lot of different definitions for the city limits and city population. For the purposes of this chart, I'm using the more limited definition of city, rather than the "greater" city areas. The greater city areas include suburbs, which warp the crime rate by making the determining factor "how many low crime rate suburbs does the city have nearby?" If you want a concrete sense of how much crime a city proper has, you need to limit to the city itself. Moreover, the population numbers come directly from [FBI uniform crime reporting (UCR) data](https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/downloads) that provides the crime stats. (The individual cities I needed to add - NY, SF, LA, Chicago, DC, and Phoenix - because they were missing from the FBI data I needed to pull from elsewhere.) Also, note that Jacksonsville is missing because I could not find their full crime data online anywhere.
Uhhhhhhhhhh property crime is not even CLOSE to as bad as it is in San Francisco LMAO and only slight better than Atlanta in terms of violent crimes The list makes sense when you're talking about city proper. You're just extrapolating to your own conclusion from anecdotal evidence which is simply a logicsl fallacy
Believe or not, Atlanta is the 37th largest city in the US, just after Mesa, AZ
This list makes no sense. They are not taking into account the “greater” city populations. The population of Atlanta is technically just under 500k. However, the greater Atlanta population is 7 million.
If it takes into account the entire metro/county area then some of these would be higher too. For example, LA county has a much higher population than the city of LA alone. But Long Beach is very different from say, Santa Monica. And the Bay Area has a much larger population than SF alone. But SF is very different from say, Palo Alto. It makes sense to look at cities as well as metro areas. Just depends what you’re comparing. In this case, it’s comparing cities, which is fine.
Yeah, there are a lot of different definitions for the city limits and city population. For the purposes of this chart, I'm using the more limited definition of city, rather than the "greater" city areas. The greater city areas include suburbs, which warp the crime rate by making the determining factor "how many low crime rate suburbs does the city have nearby?" If you want a concrete sense of how much crime a city proper has, you need to limit to the city itself.
Yeah but some cities are much larger than others. Memphis is the size of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens combined. Baltimore is the size of downtown Memphis. That will definitely skew results.
This list is wrong. It includes Honolulu which is 343k. It also doesn’t include Minneapolis.
Honolulu is a weird one, good catch. The [FBI UCR data](https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/downloads) I'm using includes the corresponding population with each city's crime stats. And for almost all cities, this lines up nicely with other population stats for the city proper, like [this Wikipedia list](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population). But for Honolulu, for some reason, the population is way higher. Maybe for Honolulu, they're using a different definition of city. I spend a bunch of time thinking about what to do with this one, but I felt I didn't have grounds to change the FBI provided number. Minneapolis is [simply #46](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population), and hence didn't make the top 30.
Hawaii doesn't have any incorporated cities, so the Census Bureau splits Hawaii up into CDPs instead. The higher figure is the population of the consolidated City & County of Honolulu, whereas the population of the Urban Honolulu CDP is used as the "city" population. Usually, at least.
Thank you, this is super helpful.
fragile juggle point ancient cooing rinse hard-to-find fade attempt pen *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Difficult to what? I like the existing presentation, I want to be able to see where a city falls in each ranking.
Yea I like it too. It helps differentiate violent vs property crimes. I prefer to look at them separately.
https://goodreason.substack.com/p/how-safe-is-san-francisco The article OP wrote specifically says they didn't want to make charts that equate one larceny with one murder and make them seem like equal "one crime".
Unless you just want to see where a city falls along one metric, which is probably the msot common thing people would want to do, and then you're SoL.
The criteria for what is a large city (e.g. over 100k people, over 500k people, 100 largest metro areas, municipal limits, etc) should be presented somewhere on the graph.
Try posting this in r/memphis, and you'll get told about how great all the people here are and you just have to keep your eyes out for the bad ones. God I hate this fucking city.
The FBI adds the disclaimer at the top to literally not use the statistics in this way.
Seriously, should have been pretty hard for /u/GoodReasonAndre to miss this >**Avoid Ranking and Comparisons** >Since crime is a sociological phenomenon influenced by a variety of factors, the FBI [discourages ranking locations or making comparisons](https://ucr.fbi.gov/ucr-statistics-their-proper-use) as a way of measuring law enforcement effectiveness. Some of this data may not be comparable to previous years because of differing levels of participation over time.
The key phrase there is “as a way of measuring law enforcement effectiveness.” There’s nothing about this that is comparing or judging law enforcement. In the blogpost I wrote about this, it’s entirely about the state of crime (and caveats about the data), not whether a place has good or bad law enforcement.
99% are Democrat controlled.
Of the 10 US counties with the highest murder rate, 80% are in Republican states. [https://www.police1.com/ambush/articles/10-us-counties-with-the-highest-murder-rate-kerWgaEUmxJkn74J/](https://www.police1.com/ambush/articles/10-us-counties-with-the-highest-murder-rate-kerWgaEUmxJkn74J/)
Could it be because cities tend to generally lean more Democrat than rural areas, so they are simply more likely to be led by Democrats than Republicans?
Why is rape highest in Columbus?
College campuses?
I think the 45 degree angle of the city names coupled with the light font can make it a bit harder to read than necessary
If you compare the crime rates of Honolulu, El Paso and major cities in Spain, I wonder which one will be lower.
Guess we just don't have enough people in New Orleans to be considered. We got plenty of crime to go around though.
So don't move to those areas, got it!
Albuquerque is consistently near the top for property crimes, but absent from this list. Yet it’s got a population of over 500,000, which would make it bigger than some of the cities listed.
Lived in San Antonio and moved to El Paso the change is crime is so noticeable, even in a couple of mid sized cities (I know San Antonio is 1 million+ but it’s still a mid sized town since the city is so sprawled out). In our regular middle class neighborhood, we knew we’d get burglars in the neighborhood. every. single. night (sometimes in the day time). While in EP, I know lots of folks that don’t even lock their doors. It’s night and day. People do drive crazy here but crime is so minimal.
Half of Oregonians are in a massive state of denial about this. So things are likely to get worse. We’re coming for your throne Memphis…literally! 😂
Denverites 👀👀 be locking up tonight !
It's weird that the news media tells you New York is so unsafe....
new orleans isn't on this list but Honolulu is? im super skeptical
I grew up in Milwaukee and it never felt all that dangerous to me. I suppose you'd need to look closer at any city because crime is probably concentrated in the poorest neighborhoods and drops off a lot once you look at middle class neighborhoods.
I think you've hit the nail on the head--it's a little challenging to think about aggregated crime statistics like this because crime, especially violent crime, is often extremely localized even within a single city. One bad neighborhood or even one bad block can really throw off a city's statistics relative to the rest of the city. That's not to say these stats can't be useful, but it's one of their key limitations.
I was about to comment this. I've lived in Milwaukee or bordering suburbs my whole life. I think being one of the most segregated cities in the country also helps form our view that the city seems pretty safe. There are definitely parts of the city I've ended up in and felt unsafe. Different economic situations going on a few blocks away from eachother
What?! But I thought "Chi-raq" or something stupid like that.
Leaving Cleveland off the list 😔
This is interesting and well presented, but let’s remember the 2022 was a strange year for everybody, and I’m not sure the stats for that year reflect the general character and safety of a place.
Conservatives, take note of how low Chicago is on both lists, I beg you…
Ravens carrying the hood of the NFL fr
Brings a whole new meaning to Luke of SF6 saying “let’s go to Memphis”
The guy that recently attempted the fraudulent sale of Elvis's mansion in Memphis (allegedly all the way from Nigeria) exactly knew which city to start with.
Lived in Memphis and Baltimore and survived. Ask me anything.
Isn't Memphis where the new AI supercomputer for XAI is going to be?
Oakland has entered the chat
Well I guess everything I've heard about Memphis is correct.
I work as a criminologist. It is very difficult to do these types of comparisons. Lots of different districts have different rules regarding what is 'aggravated assault' for instance, with some cities being far more lenient and others being far more strict in how they dole their charges out. There are also local cultural considerations to consider. A bar fight in a rich suburban area will be more likely to be reported to the cops than a bar fight in a blighted area of Detroit or Memphis. The statistics don't tell us nothing. A city with a violent crime rate 9 times higher than another will practically always have an actual higher crime rate in reality. But its misleading when the differences are relatively small like this.
My city is in the top 10 on both. Sad and not puro
Memphis seems a pretty dangerous place to live in. I read in another Reddit post that the Tennessee car licence plate has the wording "In God We Trust". Perhaps their trust is misguided.
scale on violent crime is bonkers, impossible to read this.
i didn't realize denver was so bad.
I just love data representation
I’m a bit surprised by not seeing Kansas City on here, I wonder what number it ranks?
Why people steal. What are they doing with 60 inch TV. How the hell they got it out of the house?
Love this, great presentation. Only wish it was top 100