Good to see that some in the St. Louis community were very engaged in trying to make the numbers make sense. I believe we're something like the 79th most dangerous metropolitan area. Among the rediculous aspects of this report, only 2-3 cities even have a chance at the top spot due to political boundaries. IMO - we either need to begin reporting our crime statistics in a different way (see Chicago) or demand that crime rankings be done by an MSA's most dangerous area of approximately 300-400K people while ignoring abritrary political lines. Enough of that . . . on to the story. Go Detroit!
Link: http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/s ... enDocument
Area group fights 'crime' label
By Jeremy Kohler
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
11/18/2007
What do big-city mayors, university-based criminologists, the FBI and the head of a group of criminal-justice journalists have in common?
They've all had it with an annual publication that ranks U.S. cities by danger — a list currently topped by a certain Midwestern city with a large arch.
With the help of a public relations firm, the wide-ranging consortium tried this fall to thwart the 14th annual release of the rankings, set for Sunday night.
They saw an opening. The publisher of the list, Morgan Quitno Press, is under new management: CQ Press, the publishing arm of Congressional Quarterly, a respected Capitol Hill news source. Its corporate parent is owned by the Poynter Institute, a prestigious nonprofit education center for journalists. Advertisement
From the offices of the St. Louis Regional Chamber & Growth Association, the group dialed up the publisher Oct. 17 to complain that the city rankings are baseless and damaging.
The response? Tough luck.
The most-dangerous-city list isn't going anywhere.
St. Louis has "a PR problem" because of a high crime rate, John A. Jenkins, publisher and senior vice president of CQ Press, said in an interview Friday. He called the effort to "attack the book" a spin job by Fleishman Hillard, the St. Louis-based public relations giant.
"We were cordial and wanted to hear what they wanted to say," he said. "But not publishing the book is not an option."
Paul G. Wagman, a Fleishman Hillard senior vice president and partner, said his firm worked on behalf of the RCGA and sought the meeting with CQ because the company "might listen to reason, or at least listen respectfully to their concerns." RELATED LINK
Morgan Quitno
The city danger rankings, issued for 13 years by Morgan Quitno, of Kansas, have been pure poison for some cities, which say the label scares away investors and visitors.
For the past seven years, just three cities — St. Louis, Detroit and Camden, N.J. — have held the crown no city wants. Sunday night, the report will name Detroit most dangerous city in a squeaker over St. Louis. (Mission Viejo, Calif., will be named safest city.)
For years, Morgan Quitno president Scott Morgan has shrugged off condemnation from academics — and mayoral aides — who have derided his product as inaccurate, unfair and meaningless.
The rankings are based on annual crime statistics published by the FBI. The bureau itself warns that the data should not be used for city-to-city comparisons. Although the FBI has a standardized procedure for counting crimes, in reality, cities compile statistics differently and their totals can't be compared, the bureau says.
Criminologists, critical of Morgan Quitno's methodology, have increasingly tried to steer reporters away from the rankings and toward what they consider smarter analyses of crime stats.
Last week, the executive board of the American Society of Criminology issued a statement condemning crime rankings as "irresponsible misuse of data." Richard Rosenfeld, of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, has been one of the chief critics.
Rosenfeld said Friday that city comparisons were meaningless because some cities had annexed swaths of suburbia, whereas others, such as St. Louis, are confined to the urban core. Comparing metropolitan areas is more fair, he said.
He added that other factors, such as a person's age, gender or lifestyle — or even what neighborhood he lives in — are much more important to predicting safety than knowing what city he lives in.
Put another way, a young man on the streets of Mission Viejo at midnight might be in a more dangerous place than an old woman in bed in St. Louis.
Jenkins — as Morgan did for years — dismissed suggestions that cities crime stats can't be compared.
"We want to take FBI data and do what CQ does best," he said, "take government information and make it intelligible to the lay public. That's what we do here."
Link: http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/s ... enDocument
