urbanSTL

Good question, Gary. But when you said The Post, I thought you could have been talking about the Washington Post, not 'ol Joe's on Tucker.

Another band had their equipment stolen in St. Louis (this time on The Tap Room's parking lot in the middle of the afternoon). Is this really a St. Louis thing, or is it just being played-up more here? How do our statistics compare to other cities? Are we getting (another) bad rap, or is it really out of control here?

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crim ... d07ff.html

Small scale entertainment getting hit hard. Increase in the minimum wage, increased hounding from City Hall, bands simply dropping St. Louis entirely.

Wrong path to be going down.

As a parent and a step father, I just don't know what is more messed up about what happen today involving a 11 yr old at home watching his 4 year old shooting a 16 yr old who was breaking into the home or the multiple comments who take the sheriff comments completely out of context and believe an 11 yr old did the right thing by shouting first and calling later...

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crim ... 2f03a.html

Article I wrote for the St. Louis American....thought it could be relevant to crime discussion.

http://www.stlamerican.com/news/columni ... 66ea1.html

Whether it deserves it or not, though, the ’Lou has the reputation for being the capital of band thefts. It certainly leads the Internet in people talking about them....

of course it does. everybody loves to sh*t on St. Louis whether or not it's deserved. this is just more confirmation of that trend.

gary kreie wrote:The Post has their annual piece bashing St Louis City in crime rankings on Stltoday.com. Why does the Post insist on promoting the worst rankings scientifically. "City Limit" rankings like this fail to normalize effects of wildly varying political boundaries exaggerating danger in older inner core Eastern and rust belt cities. Rankings based on consistent "statistical" boundaries such as metro rankings, show that many Western cites are more dangerous. Why do they not promote this ranking for instance? It is much more accurate. http://os.cqpress.com/citycrime/2013/20 ... igh%29.pdf

With all due respect, not this again. Boston has 656K residents in 48 1/2 square miles, and San Francisco has 853K people in 47 square miles. Put simply, both cities have substantially larger and denser populations in smaller boundaries, and yet they have significantly less crime in St. Louis. Yes, the metro area is relatively safe, but no good is served by denying that there is a serious crime problem in the City of St. Louis. Things can only get better if we have people in charge who acknowledge this unfortunate reality and actually try to do something about it, unlike our current mayor and police chief in my opinion.

I don't know if dramatically exaggerating our problems helps anything.

MSA is superior than arbitrary comparison by political boundary, but it has its own limitations. Ultimately the problem is that it doesn't make any sense to throw different cities into a comparison without any nuance or context. Even within StL City there are more and less dangerous neighborhoods.

MarkHaversham wrote:I don't know if dramatically exaggerating our problems helps anything.

I don't think it's 'dramatically exaggerating' to suggest that Boston and San Francisco have many more people and are more compact than St. Louis, yet they have significantly lower violent crime rates. That is fact, not opinion.

I have watched crime go up in my southside neighborhood and nearby areas in the 15 years that I've been here. I don't want to see the city unfairly maligned to the point where people think no neighborhoods are safe. Obviously, there are still many safe city neighborhoods. However, I think we need to deal with the reality that violent crime is on the rise by putting people in charge who realize this and actually have the courage to do something about it. I don't see that mentality at City Hall or Police HQ now.

^^^ msa's are good for looking at regions but their big problem is they tell us little about the urban core, which is what is of most interest to urbanists. Especially when we compare ourselves to rust belt peers, I do believe city comparisons on the whole are much more helpful than msa comparisons for most of the things I'm interested in knowing about. While knowing any measure is imperfect, I do wish there were a standardized Metro Division that would better carve out the core area of each of the larger metros.

roger wyoming II wrote:^^^ msa's are good for looking at regions but their big problem is they tell us little about the urban core, which is what is of most interest to urbanists. Especially when we compare ourselves to rust belt peers, I do believe city comparisons on the whole are much more helpful than msa comparisons for most of the things I'm interested in knowing about. While knowing any measure is imperfect, I do wish there were a standardized Metro Division that would better carve out the core area of each of the larger metros.

Ranking MSAs is worthless for comparing urban cores. Ranking cities is just worthless. I don't disagree that StL has an above-average crime problem, but to my ear "We have lots of crime, we're the #X ranked city in homicides!" might as well be "We have lots of crime, and I saw a puppy on the way to work today!"

I think what people really care about is how bad neighborhoods are. But then the homicide sample size is so small that it's hard to be confident about short-term trends.

Heard gunfire at 3 am this morning. Very close. Heard a car drive off after. Don't think anyone was hit as no ambulances came. C'mon people!

Where?

KMOV lead with 7 min of crime stories last night. Sheesh!

^ That's why I don't watch them anymore.

Instead of "News, Weather, Sports" they should say "Crime, Weather, Sports" !

We're in the midst of a murder wave. Someone was just shot and paralyzed after leaving a Cardinals game.

Would you prefer the media not report these things? Maybe give you a kiss on the forehead and tell you everything is fine?

Aesir wrote:We're in the midst of a murder wave. Someone was just shot and paralyzed after leaving a Cardinals game.

Would you prefer the media not report these things? Maybe give you a kiss on the forehead and tell you everything is fine?

No they need to be reported. It's the over the top fashion in which they are reported is what is a turn off. Much more constructive ways to report them instead of striking fear in a populace to keep them in front of the TV set watching the 10pm news.

Terrible crime, but this happened to one person out of 3.5 million that attended games. What about the people paralyzed in an accident driving home after drinking 5 beers?