jcity wrote:Detroit 142 square miles 688,000 population
St. Louis 66 square miles 317,000
We all know that the criteria for measuring homicide rate needs to be taken with a grain of salt due to arbitrary variations in city boundaries, etc., but I do think it's kind of a cop out to default to that every time St. Louis winds up near or at the top of these lists. Sure, Detroit is a lot bigger in both population and land area, but it's all relative, and it doesn't change the fact that St. Louis crime, regardless of how concentrated or non-random, is statistically very high. Detroit, being an old urbanized city like St. Louis only on a bigger scale, hardly benefits from this methodology in the way that say, Kansas City (329 sq. miles) or Louisville (399 sq. miles), or a number of other younger, sprawling cities do. These cities look better on paper because they have comparatively tiny urban cores and include prosperous suburban, exurban, and even rural areas within their city boundaries. In that regard, the rankings are certainly flawed, and stacked against old, urbanized cities with fixed boundaries like St. Louis and Detroit and Baltimore, that don't have the luxury of annexing suburbs to dilute their stats.
And it doesn't change the fact that St. Louis, tiny as it is at 61 sq. miles, has a considerably higher violent crime rate than cities that have even
smaller land areas (i.e. Pittsburgh- 58 sq. miles, San Francisco- 47 sq. miles, Boston- 48 sq. miles). All three of those cities also have fully developed urban cores, yet their crime rates are MUCH lower than "big" St. Louis. None of them include surrounding suburbs to pad their stats either. There seem to be a lot of misinformed people who think that combining city and county crime stats would be more accurate and would put St. Louis on an even playing field with other cities. Um... no. All of the aforementioned cities should therefore be able to include their larger suburban counties to keep it fair game for all (which of course would drop their crime stats even more), or else St. Louis comes out looking like the "cheater" a la KC, Louisville, etc.
Facts are facts. Our URBAN CORE has a very real crime problem in comparison to many of our peer cities, and at the end of the day, the central city is the face of the region and therefore this dubious distinction is not meaningless. If we expect suburban residents, out-of-town visitors, college students and businesses to experience the
real St. Louis that most of us on this forum tirelessly advocate for, we also must recognize the reality that the notion of city living in St. Louis has a different meaning than it does in places like Minneapolis or Seattle or Denver, where walking through a neighborhood or a park after sundown is an exercise in leisure and convenience and not an exercise of questionable judgment.
(Sorry for my rambling, I need coffee.)
