www.STLtoday.com Posted: Thursday, November 25, 2010 12:00 am
Point of View • National ranking lists don't tell the true story
Just in time for Thanksgiving, St. Louis has been named America's most dangerous city. We wrested this badge of dishonor away from last year's winner, Camden, N.J., thanks to a violent crime rate four times the national average.
Anyone who has followed the crime rankings released annually by CQ Press knows that our fair city has been inching toward this dubious distinction for years. We ranked second in 2006 and 2007, our ignominy eclipsed only by Detroit. In 2008, we drifted to fourth place. We were back in the running in 2009, ranking behind only Camden. This year, our criminals took a back seat to no one.
Of course, the rankings are unfair. I explained this to my father-in-law when he e-mailed me from Peoria to ask about them. More than 2,000 violent crimes per 100,000 residents? What's going on down there?
I responded by rattling off reasons our rank does not matter. For starters, the city-county split in St. Louis skews our metro area's crime and population statistics. St. Louis is surrounded by the sort of safe, suburban neighborhoods that are incorporated into the city limits of other, more geographically sprawling cities. If you consider our metro area's crime rate as a whole - including satellite communities like O'Fallon, Mo., which ranked as America's second safest city - we fare much better.
Even in the city, things are looking up. A spokesperson for St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay said crime has been dropping since 2007 - and that's without using Chicago-style counting methods. Al Capone's adopted hometown did not even make CQ Press' list this year, despite a 2009 murder rate that eclipsed New York's, because Chicago does not conform to FBI crime-counting standards.
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