Crime and Politics : The Top 50 Worst Cities in The United States
#Crime #Minds #Politics #Statistics #OpenMinds
I often wonder exactly how safe I am here in the United States of America. With the twenty-four hour news cycle piling tragedy on top of criminal activity I feel less and less in control of my surroundings than ever before. Now keep in mind, I live alone, I commute more than an hour a day, and I often travel in periods of low light to total darkness. Sounds just like the recipe for target of criminal activity, but somehow day after day, week after week I manage to not get shot, stabbed, or killed. Others in my city let alone my state are not nearly as fortunate.
According an FBI study of crime in the United States from 2016 my city had a violent crime rate of 887 per 100,000 residents (88.7 per 10,000 or 8.87 per 1,000) which when looking at places like El Salvador with a 2015 crime rate of 108 per 100,000 (10.0 per 10,000) makes Miami look like the center of a war zone. I thought, this can't possibly be right how can El Salvador, a country with drug cartels and gangs be more safe than Miami? So in an effort to understand I dug into the numbers which in reality didn't get much better the “Bluer” your state or city becomes.i, ii
Now all things considered Miami didn't even make in the top 50 cities in the United States that have violent crime rates of more than 900 per 100,000 residents and ranks 54 overall not not too far down from the worst. The interesting thing I found is that regardless of the states political affiliation the city governance in all but eight of them were Democrats. Matter of fact the top 15 cities with crime rates of 1192-2046 per 100,000 were all run by democrats. That's 1 to 2 violent crimes per one hundred people living in 50 cities in the United States!
But can it all be politics? Possibly, but I had to dig deeper. I started with the worst Detroit with a 2046.5 per 100,000 violent crime rate and compared it to the demographics from virginia.edu and neighborhoodscout.com, two sites that offer maps of crime and/or demographics and what I found was not really that surprising. In Primarily Democrat run cities with a disproportionate mix of minorities crime was the highest. Not just in Detroit, but in each of the 50 top worst places for violent crime all centered around the inner cities.
This however is just a snapshot in time of how 2015-2016 looked, primarily because newer numbers aren't out there, and only shows a possible correlation of statistical data when compared to population density. There is no denying that this could all be a false equivalency, or just bad comparative analysis on my part because it does not take into account long term trends in political decisions or the dissolving of the family unit in inner cities, or intelligence factors, but it does provide some food for thought. The rest id up to you to decide and investigate for yourself.
Sources:
UNODC Crime Statistics 2015 UNODC Crime Statistics 2015: https://data.unodc.org/#state:3
CIA World Factbook:https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
FBI Crime and Statistics Data: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016
OSAC Crime and Safety Report: https://www.osac.gov/
World Popularion Statistics: http://www.worldpopulationstatistics.com/population-of-mexico/