urbanSTL

I think Bill's column sums this situation up pretty well.

Of all the unfortunate things that could happen to three young Marines visiting St. Louis, I cannot imagine anything worse than getting mugged by two guys.
Getting mugged by a bunch of guys? Fine. That happens. But when you outnumber your muggers, that's not good.


http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/colu ... 9ae65.html

I was glad to see that at least a few commenters on the STL Today page noted that crimes far worse than this regularly occur in the small towns that surround a lot of these military bases.

You have to look for them amid the almost instantaneous and numerous comments of the city bashers who seem to lurk waiting for ANY story that they twist to confirm their belief that St. Louis is a lost cause. I guess when you have literally nothing else to do with your life.

When is his term up?

^^ and that more or less is my main point.

[in regards to Alex's response to my own] -

1 - I think that the Crime cameras in Alderman French's ward, the NOW team in Dutchtown, and the IBM audit are all positive steps to addressing our crime problem.

2 - Perception absolutely matters most.

There has never been a collected, concise, top-down, country wide response to our Crime stigma. Ever. There should be an office of five fully staffed people continually spinning out creative ideas to managing our Crime perception. Maybe there is. But we don't know about it. No one ever talks about a strategy to address the crime problem. Slay announces the IBM audit via his blog. A leader that is working hard to improve his City's image would have called a press conference to announce the information. Why not sensationalize in the right direction?

Question: Does Slay come across as a strong leader? As a Mayor that is working day in day out to stop the crime? If your answer is no than the king and his court are not working hard enough. Expecting my leadership to fight hard for my City is different than having a negative perception.

Again, continually whining about negative reporting and wonky stats is so weak!

ttricamo wrote:^^ and that more or less is my main point.

Seriously, when is his term up? Who can we elect for mayor that will actually give a sh*t and do something instead of whining that the statistics are wrong?

Its not that the FBI statistics are wrong, it is how they are used by CQ Press to create a ranking that is wrong.

Suppose you wanted to find the US city with the tallest buildings. And you start by deciding to draw a circle around each city and include all the buildings inside the circle to compute an average building height. So far so good.

But then you tell each city that they get to draw the circle wherever they want. St. Louis draws their circle just around downtown. Houston draws theirs around the entire Houston Metro area. You do the math, and announce that St. Louis ranks first in average building height, ahead of Houston. St. Louis would be labeled the tallest city in America. Technically, for the rules you chose, you would be statistically correct.

Replace "building height" with "crime count", and "circle" with "city limit", and you have the same problem with the city crime ranking.

Hey, I wonder if St. Louis IS the tallest "city" in America? We should ask CQ Press to find that out.

Gary that is a fantastic analogy. It would be fun to put together lists of similar, yet whacky things that St. Louis would be tops at in mockery of crime rankings. Even if it just got local exposure, it would help better explain the apples to oranges comparisons of city to city comparisons.

moorlander wrote:Gary that is a fantastic analogy. It would be fun to put together lists of similar, yet whacky things that St. Louis would be tops at in mockery of crime rankings. Even if it just got local exposure, it would help better explain the apples to oranges comparisons of city to city comparisons.

And it would just add fuel to the arguments of people like Erina and ttricamo who say we spend more time talking about boundaries and data problems than we do about how to actually reduce crime in this city. I understand the boundaries argument, and I appreciate the clever re-framing of an issue. I agree that we're not apples-to-apples with sprawling Sun Belt cities. But after awhile it just comes off like an excuse.

Because really, St. Louis is not that small. At 62 square miles, it's the exact same size as DC. Bigger than Pittsburgh and Minneapolis, Boston and San Francisco. Buffalo. Miami. Providence. Newark.

http://www.census.gov/statab/ccdb/cit1010r.txt

Those are all old cities with tight boundaries, most are home to a disproportionate share of their region's poor and troubled residents. Some have a more dense population than us, some less. Some are growing, some not. But they all have lower crime rates than the City of St. Louis. The root of our city's perception issue is not that St. Louis is small. It is that St. Louis is unusually violent (or at least has some extremely unusually violent neighborhoods). That's a real problem.

For what it's worth, I don't think this is the mayor's "fault," and I agree that the solution doesn't ultimately lay in policing, or "getting tough" on crime, whatever that means. Like Slay said, the real answer is jobs and education and rebuilding the city's middle class. Trouble is, that's a lot harder to pull off than complaining that Houston's bigger than we are.

What if the relative small size of the City proper happened to contribute to an unusually low crime rate compared to other cities? Conceivably, that would be a possibility right?

Less people + less land area = less crime. I mean, that COULD happen right?

The following chart which you've probably all seen clearly shows that's not the case.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Sta ... crime_rate

I'm considering going on a news/media/information sabbatical for six months and see how I feel. Violent crime against innocent people in beautiful neighborhoods just annoys me. In reality, "crime" has had zero effect on anything I've done since I've been in St. Louis other than recognizing that about a third of it might not be the smartest place to a take a walk.

Alex Ihnen wrote:

Alex Ihnen wrote:St. Louis is not "unusually violent".

The point is that comparing like-sized cities doesn't tell us much. The argument isn't that St. Louis has a high crime rate because it's small - that wouldn't make any sense. The issue is that the city encompasses much of the lowest income part of a 2.5M person metro area. I just pulled some quick numbers to highlight this point. D.C/San Fran/Boston may be about the same sq mi as STL, but median income is vastly different:

DC: $52,811
Boston: $39,629
San Francisco: $71,451
St. Louis: $27,156

Unfortunate numbers but do they give us a pass on managing our crime perception?

I would love it if we had a negative stigma and a low crime rate, similar to outer North County. Although, the stigma of North county has pretty well taken it's toll in places like Florissant, ensuring many middle-to-upper class whites never move here again.

"Do or do not. There is no try."
- Potential mayoral candidate slogan

OK, I had to try this. What city is the tallest in the Nation?
I used the data from this page on Skyscraper.com that ranked cities with the most completed high rises in North America.
http://skyscraperpage.com/cities/?10=1
I eliminated cities not in the US and those with less than 300K population. The Skyscraper.com page originally ranks those cities in this order, which seems logical. St. Louis is number 20 out of 30.

1 New York City
2 Chicago
3 Los Angeles
4 Honolulu
5 Houston
6 San Francisco
7 Philadelphia
8 Washington
9 Boston
10 Dallas
11 Miami
12 Atlanta
13 Seattle
14 Denver
15 Detroit
16 Minneapolis
17 Las Vegas
18 Baltimore
19 Portland
20 St. Louis
21 San Diego
22 Kansas City
23 New Orleans
24 Cincinnati
25 Pittsburgh
26 Nashville
27 Cleveland
28 Milwaukee
29 San Antonio
30 Indianapolis

BUT, if you use the same data right off the page at the link above, and apply the CQ Press methodology -- dividing by the number of people in the city, the ranking comes out like this:

1 Honolulu
2 Miami
3 New York City
4 San Francisco
5 Atlanta
6 Washington
7 Boston
8 Minneapolis
9 St. Louis
10 Chicago
11 Denver
12 Cincinnati
13 Seattle
14 Pittsburgh
15 Las Vegas
16 Kansas City
17 Cleveland
18 Portland
19 Baltimore
20 New Orleans
21 Dallas
22 Philadelphia
23 Detroit
24 Houston
25 Nashville
26 Milwaukee
27 Los Angeles
28 Indianapolis
29 San Diego
30 San Antonio

Shockingly, St. Louis is the second tallest city in the Midwest at number 9, right behind Minneapolis at 8 and AHEAD of Chicago at 10. Kansas City is a distant 16th, and forget Indy. If you were afraid of high rises falling on you, you might want to live in a short city with a low skyscraper per capita ratio, such as Houston or LA, according to CQ Press thinking.

Alex Ihnen wrote:

Alex Ihnen wrote:St. Louis is not "unusually violent".

The point is that comparing like-sized cities doesn't tell us much. The argument isn't that St. Louis has a high crime rate because it's small - that wouldn't make any sense. The issue is that the city encompasses much of the lowest income part of a 2.5M person metro area. I just pulled some quick numbers to highlight this point. D.C/San Fran/Boston may be about the same sq mi as STL, but median income is vastly different:

DC: $52,811
Boston: $39,629
San Francisco: $71,451
St. Louis: $27,156

Every city I listed, with the possible exception of San Francisco, encompasses "much of the lowest income part" of their respective metro areas, and many of their most crime-afflicted neighborhoods. Even DC (Anacostia) and Boston (Mattapan, Dorchester)

If the median income in Boston and DC is higher - and it is - that's because those cities have done a better job than St. Louis of maintaining (or restoring) their attractiveness to middle and upper-income residents, and they have larger areas that are "nicer." They're also considerably wealthier metro areas than STL, which will skew all the numbers upward. (Median income in Pittburgh and Buffalo is pretty close to ours). It's a fair bet that translates into less crime per capita, as middle class people with decent jobs don't commit a whole lot of violent crime. I completely agree that the root of our crime problem is economics. But that doesn't mean we don't have a crime problem.

My point in talking about the geographic size of cities is simply to counter those who always bring up vast Sun Belt cities and say "It's not fair because they don't count our suburbs." CQ doesn't count anyone's suburbs (but they don't give us East St. Louis or Wellston, either)
And to Gone Corporate's question. I found the full rankings for '09.

http://os.cqpress.com/citycrime/2009/Ci ... gs2009.htm

Based on the population numbers they list, it appears that they're consistently measuring the "city proper" - not MSAs. Here are how the cities I mentioned fared:

DC: 16th
Buffalo: 27th
Newark: 29th
Minneapolis: 30th
Pittsburgh: 48th
San Fran: 93rd
Boston: 104th
Providence: 123rd
Miami wasn't listed.

In 2009, St. Louis was No. 2.

RobbyD wrote:

ttricamo wrote:

Alex Ihnen wrote: The point is that comparing like-sized cities doesn't tell us much. The argument isn't that St. Louis has a high crime rate because it's small - that wouldn't make any sense. The issue is that the city encompasses much of the lowest income part of a 2.5M person metro area. I just pulled some quick numbers to highlight this point. D.C/San Fran/Boston may be about the same sq mi as STL, but median income is vastly different:

DC: $52,811
Boston: $39,629
San Francisco: $71,451
St. Louis: $27,156

Unfortunate numbers but do they give us a pass on managing our crime perception?

I would love it if we had a negative stigma and a low crime rate, similar to outer North County. Although, the stigma of North county has pretty well taken it's toll in places like Florissant, ensuring many middle-to-upper class whites never move here again.

Darth ttriamco, only Sith talk in such stark absolutes...The future of N County is anything but sure...As for the reputation you speak of, I agree, I do...(And no, I do not own Yoda ears)

Im cool with racist whites leaving the area, many of whom who have been replaced with middle class blacks. These folks are great neighbors and a little shocked to see a young family exchanging "hellos" with them as we cross paths walking strollers are riding bikes but are awesome nonetheless.

Are you sure this wasn't it?

http://www.ksdk.com/news/article/264613 ... -Out-Game-