I must be a cowardly traveler-- my Violent City score is lower than my Erdös-Bacon Number.
St. Louis crime is just based on St. Louis city but the county is so huge…it’s a bit of a distortion.
I don’t live too far from the city but I am definitely in the county. The majority of violent crime in the STL area happens in the city limits, not in the county. County has plenty of property crime, vehicle theft, etc in certain areas…but you don’t see very many murders. If the city proper wasn’t so small, we’d fall out of the top of these lists fast, I reckon. The county is around a million people or so and the city only 300-something thousand? Of course, I don’t know if we are the only city like this, with our “city” being only a tiny part of the metro area, but it gives us a bad rap and it’s a bummer. A lot of the crime is gang/drug related too, so stay away from all that, and there’s not a huge chance of being popped, probably. :dubious:
Projecting ahead to the end of the month, after I make my trip, I’ll have 17 points.
1 point! Woohoo!
Eh, I lived in Detroit for five years and the only time I felt unsafe was the time I flipped off a bad driver and he practically stopped on a busy street to curse at me. Most crime happens to criminals.
or domestic violence victims…but yeah, most murders aren’t random drive by massarces…
30 points - yikes. I must be a Billy Badass…
I travel to STL regularly and based on this thread I’ll change where I usually stay. (Thanks, Jerry) Instead of along I-70 I’ll stay along I-64. That way, when I go into downtown I won’t be along 70.
I have wandered into E STL, just poking around. Want to go to Cahokia Mounds sometime soon. I hear that’s interesting.
It is very interesting. Definitely worth going.
It’s not often I stick up for Republicans, but in this case, it was very specific Republicans and mostly the Moroun family, who are a special kind of evil. The Republican governor supported it, and it did get approval this past election (this was actually a fight, a free friggin’ bridge from Canada!).
Well, Maroun family and Tea Party Republicans.
I think this is the report from the FBI that Little Nemo was referencing. Yeah, it only covers the first 6 months of 2012, but I’m not surprised they haven’t processed July-December yet.
Anyway, from the link, the FBI’s definition of “violent crime” is:
I don’t know if they’re working off of convictions, indictments, police reports, or some amalgamation of the three. “Crimes brought to their attention” makes it sound like they’re working off of complaints and police reports, but I don’t know for certain.
I wonder if there is a correlation between how “ugly” an area of a city is and the crime rate.
I realize ugly is subjective but perhaps an objective, working definition could be created. Maybe a study could use metrics such as trees per square mile, amount of trash and buildings in poor repair.
Or maybe the ugly aesthetics are just a symptom of the poverty, which is the prime motivator for crime in the area.
Still, I would imagine that how a place looks has some kind of psychological effect on the mindsets and expectations of behavior from the populace.
I wonder, if there was a concentrated effort to clean up these places and increase police presence like they did in NY City, whether that would have a positive effect.
Or is it just a matter of socioeconomics only.
Well yes, you are talking about the broken windows theory.
That is your basic vicious cycle. Poor areas become ugly, and cities eventually give up.
A case in point here in Little Rock; vandals were breaking light bulbs in ornamental lamp posts on a Roosevelt Road bridge, and the city eventually gave up repairing them.
Ugly, abandoned areas attract criminals, and things go to hell.
About a year or two back the grandparents took us on a drive through the old neighborhood in Flint where they used to live 60+ years ago, and it was horrifically sad what’s become of the area. A lot of the houses were burned to the ground, and the ones that weren’t looked like crack houses or worse. And even the school my mom went to for kindergarten (and walked there and back by herself, that’s how safe things were back then) had recently been burned down.
Yes…I haven’t lived in the area that long but even in the eleven years I’ve been here I’ve seen some neighborhoods visibly declineand I’ve3 heard repoprts and seen photos of what it was like 30+ years ago. It’s very sad. I don’t think people who have never seen blighted rust-belt cities like Flint can comprehend how bad it is. Although there’s lots of “ruin porn” showing Detroit, Flint and similar cities on YouTube.
On the other hand, there is also a lot of fairly passionate grass-roots activism in cities like Flint; something you don’t see in more affluent cities where people take everything for granted.
I’m surprised Cabot Cove isn’t on the list, unless perhaps the low rate of non-murder violence keeps the average down. 
Can we expect to see new American crime dramas set in these previously ignored cities ?
Or maybe not.
Michigan Five-O? I’m doubting it.
Flint Five-O has a ring to it. Although there’s a shortage of bikini-clad, tanned, buff babes and dudes around here.