Posted November 19, 200717 yr Woohoo..We're on the list! er...um...well...at least we're on a list? from the AP wire: A list of the most and least dangerous cities with at least 75,000 residents, as measured by the study "City Crime Rankings: Crime in Metropolitan America," published by Washington-based CQ Press. The authors analyzed FBI crime statistics released Sept. 24. The danger score uses zero as the national average 1. Detroit 407.2 2. St. Louis 406.2 3. Flint, Mich. 381.0 4. Oakland, Calif. 338.9 5. Camden, N.J. 323.8 6. Birmingham, Ala. 268.8 7. North Charleston, S.C. 254.3 8. Memphis, Tenn. 245.6 9. Richmond, Calif. 245.1 10. Cleveland 244.4 11. Orlando, Fla. 237.4 12. Baltimore 236.7 13. Little Rock, Ark. 233.8 14. Compton, Calif. 223.6 15. Youngstown, Ohio 222.0 16. Cincinnati 218.3 17. Gary, Ind. 214.0 18. Kansas City, Mo. 203.4 19. Dayton, Ohio 201.5 20. Newark, N.J. 197.3 linkg Incidentally, Parma is made the "safest" list, for large suburbs. So the Cleveland area has a most dangerous city AND a safest suburb.
November 19, 200717 yr Aside from the fact that there is a large propensity of Ohio cities on this list...I REALLY hate these rankings/listings and what not. What do these really mean...what purpose do they serve?
November 19, 200717 yr I'm not sure if this is the same survey that I looked into several years ago, but if it is, I remember that a murder and car theft are weighted the same.. and I just don't see the logic in that..
November 19, 200717 yr I do. There's many people who are much more likely to get murdered than you because of their lifestyle. On the other hand, anyone's car can get broken into. Yet, murder is a much worse crime.
November 19, 200717 yr I do. There's many people who are much more likely to get murdered than you because of their lifestyle. On the other hand, anyone's car can get broken into. Yet, murder is a much worse crime. I just realized what a d!ckheaded way I chose to construct that first sentence.
November 19, 200717 yr It also depends on what part of the city you live in, too. Patterson Park is safer than say Riverdale. I hate this statistic. New Orleans is not on that list because they don't disclose their stats, I think.
November 19, 200717 yr Weren't some of the most crime ridden parts of N.O effected by katrina? Maybe their crime is much more dispersed now.
November 19, 200717 yr ... Full article from CNN: Experts say 'most dangerous city' rankings twist numbers DETROIT, Michigan (AP) -- In another blow to the Motor City's tarnished image, Detroit pushed past St. Louis to become the nation's most dangerous city, according to a private research group's controversial analysis, released Sunday, of annual FBI crime statistics. more below: http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/11/18/dangerous.cities.ap/index.html
November 19, 200717 yr How can Philly not have made this list? Don't worry, Philly landed at No. 21. And Philly's naughty little brother, Camden, is fifth. Anyways... congrats to Parma.
November 19, 200717 yr btw, Toledo ranked 47th and Columbus 48th most dangerous cities. The study excluded Chicago, Minneapolis and other Illinois and Minnesota cities due to incomplete data.
November 19, 200717 yr cities like columbus are so low because they have many homogenized suburban communities within their borders, thus diluting their crime numbers. Notice how virtually no city like that (Indy, Louisville, etc.) are on that list.
November 19, 200717 yr cities like columbus are so low because they have many homogenized suburban communities within their borders, thus diluting their crime numbers. Notice how virtually no city like that (Indy, Louisville, etc.) are on that list. True, 23rd safest city Parma would be a Columbus neighborhood, not a suburb, if it was relocated to Franklin County.
November 19, 200717 yr Had to make this thread more "equal" for the state as this is quite telling... "You don't just walk into a bar and mix it up by calling a girl fat" - buildingcincinnati speaking about new forumers
November 20, 200717 yr ...good showing for Ohio's cities! Well, at least someone picked up I was being ironic/sarcastic. I think.
November 20, 200717 yr Good grief... I hate these list. Do we really need a yearly ranking of the cities with the most or least crime? It's like restating the obvious over and over again; the cities on the list rarely change except for flip-flopping positions. Pointless saturation of the public with data IMO.
November 20, 200717 yr btw, Toledo ranked 47th and Columbus 48th most dangerous cities. The study excluded Chicago, Minneapolis and other Illinois and Minnesota cities due to incomplete data. And don't think this isn't intentional. (at least that's what my smell test says and I have absolutely no facts to back this up.) Either way, I'm off to St. Louis to commit a few felonies to bump detroit down to #2
November 20, 200717 yr Yeah from my understanding Chicago and Los Angeles are pretty dangerous, overall. There's no reason for there to be incomplete data. I'm guessing cities are required to expose crime data as public information (it's usually on the city's website).
November 20, 200717 yr Yeah from my understanding Chicago and Los Angeles are pretty dangerous, overall. There's no reason for there to be incomplete data. I'm guessing cities are required to expose crime data as public information (it's usually on the city's website). Chicago's reporting doesn't conform with FBI standards. As far as I know (which I don't), they legally shouldn't be doing it that way, but its not like that's ever stopped our favorite political family in chicago from doing something.
November 20, 200717 yr just stop reporting the numbers, or change the formats to make them unusable and you are off the list next year.
November 20, 200717 yr Leave Daley alone. Hes an environmentalist. His city hall has a green roof for God's sake!
November 20, 200717 yr Someone should tell George Bush to put a green roof on the White House...end all his opposition.
November 20, 200717 yr ^And Bush's approval ratings return to the mid 90s along with November's average temps: Solar Power is Back at The White House In 1980, the Reagan administration removed perfectly good, working solar thermal panels from the White House (these same solar collectors are still working at Unity College in Unity, Maine). The EcoMall spearheaded the Proposal to Solarize the White House, forming "The Solar Campaign" with other solar energy advocates, and posted an alert at our site asking our visitors to e-mail The White House urging them to use renewable energy technologies on the White House grounds. We are happy to report that 23 years after the previous solar panels were removed, two solar thermal systems and a 9 kW photovoltaic (PV) solar electricity system have returned to the White House. Since September 2002, a grid of 167 solar panels on the roof of a maintenance shed has been delivering electricity to the White House grounds. Another solar installation has been helping to provide hot water. Yet another has been heating the water in the presidential pool. The impetus behind implementing the solar roof was that a roof on the White House grounds had to be replaced anyway, and it made economical as well as environmental sense to incorporate solar energy. It was time to replace the roof on what is called "The Pony Shed", a maintenance building that replaced the stable that once housed Macaroni, a pony owned by President Kennedy's daughter, Caroline. It was actually the National Park Service's decision to utilize a solar energy system on the White House grounds, similar to other solar installations made by the Park Service throughout the country. The Park Service, which is responsible for the building, had already mandated that any refurbishments of its facilities should incorporate environmentally-friendly design whenever possible. Please e-mail the White House and thank them for bringing solar back to the White House and urge them to continue their commitment to utilizing and promoting non-polluting, sustainable, renewable energy technologies. Written by: Tom Kay Other sources: The New York Times http://www.ecomall.com/greenshopping/solarwhitehouse.htm
November 20, 200717 yr dc should be in top 20!!! Clearly it should be and clearly this list is screwy. (I really thought that crime was much worse here than Cleve.) Since everyone I know here has been held up at gun point (many several times/most in "good" neighborhoods, and one I know killed when he didnt "move" quick enough). I guess one thing DC may have going for it is that with the massive gentification, alot of crime has moved into PG county (across the border in Maryland)
November 20, 200717 yr I read the news, how isn't Miami in the top 10? I would assume it is because miami/dade county have a unified police force and report crimes as such. The city of miami has only 404k but the county has 2.4 mil and this list is based on per capita
November 20, 200717 yr All the more it should be on there, Miami-Dade County has by far the highest crime rate in the state. It wouldn't be fair to call the list "Most Dangerous Cities" if that is the case. Also the city has its own police force but anyway back to Ohio...
November 20, 200717 yr cities like columbus are so low because they have many homogenized suburban communities within their borders, thus diluting their crime numbers. Notice how virtually no city like that (Indy, Louisville, etc.) are on that list. This is exactly right and why these types of surveys are worthless. Every major city has bad parts of town, however the cities on the list have smaller official city limits than the other major metropolitan areas.
November 20, 200717 yr ^ Exactly, and not trying to sugar-coat the fact that Cleveland's got some issues with crime, but a look at the metro area as a whole is far more representative of the true quality of life in the Cleveland area. The sad thing is that the general public doesn't look at this way, they only see the numbers and form their opinions and generalizations off of those. A little off topic, but was talking with someone at work about how Cleveland and Chicago compare and she stated "Oh, I heard that you can even walk around at night there". I responded informing her that of course you can walk around, but just like Cleveland or any other big city, there are areas you should avoid at night. She then stated, "But you can actually walk around there downtown at night safely"; as if to say if your in DT Cleveland after dark your pretty much guaranteed to be mugged, shot, stabbed, carjacked, or something of the like. These are the attitudes these studies continue to fuel; people that rarely head into the city yet make numerous generalizations based on numbers and biased media reports.
November 20, 200717 yr ^anecdotally, detroit actually used the MQ methodology and applied to downtown only. Turns out, detroit has one of the top 10 safest downtowns.
November 20, 200717 yr ^Correct! Detroit's neighborhoods have some serious, serious problems, but as far as the tourists might be concerned, Detroit's downtown is very safe (relative to other downtowns). From a 2007 study by Demographer Jason C. Booza: http://www.tedconline.com/uploads/2007_Final_Crime_Report%5B1%5D.pdf
November 20, 200717 yr Those stats don't seem to bear out the assertion that Downtown Detroit is safe relative to other Downtowns. It is the second highest crime rate in the study, and roughly triple that of the 3 safest downtowns (good showing Cincy, btw) and almost double Chicago's. It does have a good property crime rate compared to the US and Michigan as a whole, however.
November 20, 200717 yr I'm a little confused as to their definitions of "downtowns", as well. While they are studying a fairly small segment of Detroit's population (the cited "downtown" population is approximately 9.5% of the city population), the "downtown" populations of the other cities in the study are much larger chunks of their respective populations: 17.1% of Indianapolis's overall population, 27.3% of Chicago's, 30.8% of Cincinnati's, 43.4% of Minneapolis and 45.2% of Atlanta. So when they say "downtown", they actually are looking at much larger swaths of land ... in another thread (http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php?topic=415.60), Cincy's CBD population was estimated as just short of 4,000, while the greater CBD area was a little over 7,000; in the study, Cincy's downtown population is 93,189. Not sure what kind of impact this has on the results (i.e. whether including the neighborhoods adjacent to CBDs in other cities makes Detroit look safer), but it does call into question the methodology, at least in my mind. As a point of comparison, Cleveland's Downtown Statistical Planning Area has roughly twice the Part I crime rate of Goodrich-Kirtland and Ohio City and about 4 times the crime rate of Tremont. If you added these neighborhoods together as one "downtown district", you'd have a crime rate about half that of the CBD's ... and that district would still have a crime rate twice the average citywide. So I would be interested in knowing whether the study is showing that downtowns are relatively safe compared to other types of living environments nationwide ... or if the data might actually be pointing to neighborhoods adjoining CBDs being the truly safe ones. Just a thought.
November 20, 200717 yr I wonder if they are referencing daytime populations? Nearly half of Atlanta's population surely doesn't live near or in downtown.
November 20, 200717 yr I'm a little confused as to their definitions of "downtowns", as well. While they are studying a fairly small segment of Detroit's population (the cited "downtown" population is approximately 9.5% of the city population), the "downtown" populations of the other cities in the study are much larger chunks of their respective populations: 17.1% of Indianapolis's overall population, 27.3% of Chicago's, 30.8% of Cincinnati's, 43.4% of Minneapolis and 45.2% of Atlanta. So when they say "downtown", they actually are looking at much larger swaths of land ... in another thread (http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php?topic=415.60), Cincy's CBD population was estimated as just short of 4,000, while the greater CBD area was a little over 7,000; in the study, Cincy's downtown population is 93,189. Not sure what kind of impact this has on the results (i.e. whether including the neighborhoods adjacent to CBDs in other cities makes Detroit look safer), but it does call into question the methodology, at least in my mind. As a point of comparison, Cleveland's Downtown Statistical Planning Area has roughly twice the Part I crime rate of Goodrich-Kirtland and Ohio City and about 4 times the crime rate of Tremont. If you added these neighborhoods together as one "downtown district", you'd have a crime rate about half that of the CBD's ... and that district would still have a crime rate twice the average citywide. So I would be interested in knowing whether the study is showing that downtowns are relatively safe compared to other types of living environments nationwide ... or if the data might actually be pointing to neighborhoods adjoining CBDs being the truly safe ones. Just a thought. it counts residents and employment
November 20, 200717 yr Also it is the "DVA Population" (downtown visitor area) that includes areas that are not downtown.
November 21, 200717 yr This discussion of the Detroit study just highlights the fundamental problems with this kind of study. It's hard to come up with a reasonable way to account for population and the geography. E.g., do you count just residents (which unfairly penalizes all cities) or workers (hard to count and most are in offices all day), too? Just the CBD (poorly defined), all of the city (big variances as places like Jacksonville exist where city=metro), or the whole metro (weirdly lumps places like Chagrin Falls in w/East Cleveland)? In the end, whole metro is probably the fairest way, but it averages across so many different areas within the metro that it really loses its usefulness...
November 23, 200717 yr "all-time high of 2,245 in 1990" Surprised they weren't hitting those numbers in the 1970's
November 23, 200717 yr Those NYC stats are amazing-one of the very best parts of living there. I think Philly has about the same number of murders as NYC even though it's only 1/6 the size.
November 23, 200717 yr ^Maybe they should include corporate crimes! JK i'm not a hippie communist. But I do prefer the Financial Times.
November 25, 200717 yr "all-time high of 2,245 in 1990" Surprised they weren't hitting those numbers in the 1970's I think 1990 was the culmination of the crack craze so many youngsters were "in to."
November 26, 200717 yr The '70s had more stranger murders (muggings, random killings), '90 was the peak of gang war and drug land style killings with a bump in the other stuff as well.
November 26, 200717 yr it counts residents and employment But unless they did some special crime assessments, crime rates are typically figured per 100,000 residents, not visitors. So downtowns with sparse residential populations would look more dangerous than downtowns with large residential bases, even if numbers of crime were similar and daytime populations were similar.
November 26, 200717 yr ^?^ The graphic states that they included residents and workers in the downtowns. People who are strictly speaking "visitors" are not included.
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