10 Most Dangerous Cities in the US

[Canadave]

Why are the crime rates so high in these cities? It can't just be a result of poverty or unemployment? Tasmania's median income is lower than some of these cities, though our unemployment rate is lower than all the cities.

I'm no expert on Tasmania. But I'd say a major difference and reason is diversity of population.

I'm not sure about that, as the City of Toronto had 61 homicides last year. This is a city with a population of 2,503,281 (as of 2006), and where nearly 50% of the population is non-white, arguably the most multicultural city in he world. And that's as-of 2006, again, by now I suspect whites are a plurality in Toronto, not a majority.

Similar numbers hold true for Canada's other immigration centres, like Montreal and Vancouver. Here in Ottawa (est. population of ~900,000, 23% non-white population) we had seven homicides in 2010. In fact, Canada's highest homocide rates are in Saskatchewan (4.1 per 100,000), one of the least diverse provinces. I don't think diversity has any significant effect on violent crime rates in most countries.

 

[auntiehill]

Maybe Canadians are just nicer people.

 

[RoJoHen]

I'm fairly certain they are.

 

[Canadave]

Maybe Canadians are just nicer people.

Hence why I didn't even bother to compare the crime stats to American cities...

 

[MacLeod]

You know what is shocking about that is that some places have higher murder rates than some countries. I think the latest figurs for the UK where something like 13.5 per MILLION.

 

[Miss Chicken]

You know what is shocking about that is that some places have higher murder rates than some countries. I think the latest figurs for the UK where something like 13.5 per MILLION.

Yes, if you look at Detroit

2. Detroit
Population: 899,447
Violent Crime Per 1,000: 18.9
2010 Murders: 310

and compare it to the whole of Australia which has a similar amount of murders per year (Australia averages about 300 a year), despite the fact that Australia has a population about 24 times that of Detroit, it just shows how extraordinarily high Detroit's murder rate is.

Edited to add - It seems that Australia averages about 300 homicides a year but homicide includes manslaughter. For example in 2008, Australia had a total of 290 homicides, which consisted of 260 murders and 30 cases of manslaughter.

 

[nevermore]

This is not a big mystery, folks. I mean, do you think that maybe centuries of entrenched social, economic, and racial inequalities in the US, an historical situation largely unique to the US among developed countries, might just have something to do with it?

To expand on my point, you have to look at it on the neighborhood level; most of these cities have large ghettoized populations living in communities where there is simply no viable opportunity for the vast majority except the drug trade and other criminal enterprise. College education is largely out of reach, decent-paying low-skilled jobs are virtually non-existant, and after generations of living in those circumstances people have given up and turned to the only thing they see working for others - crime. This trend of isolation and lack of mobility accelerated in the last 4 decades following the white- and middle-class flight of the 1970's that was precipitated by the race riots after Martin Luther Kings assassination (look at the list of cities here; many of them were places where those riots took place, and that's not a coincidence) and was exacerbated by the almost complete loss of industrial jobs that actually allowed for upward mobility among the unskilled in the following decades. It is in those neighborhoods that the vast majority of violent crimes take place.

 

[MacLeod]

Other nations have had their share of socio-economical and racial issues, true maybe not as bad as the US but they have had them, and yet still maintained signifigantly lower homicide rates.

 

[Canadave]

^ However, it is true in that the United States is fairly unique with regards to the phenomenon of white flight and the abandonment of urban centres. I think that has as much to do with it as anything, along with the lax American laws regarding firearms.

 

[MacLeod]

^Well perhaps as you say the easier access to firearms in the States might also be a contributing factor.

 

[nevermore]

^Yes, except that Canadians own as many (legal) guns per capita as Americans, yet...they don't have the other factors.

In other words, it's a combination of issues not only in the US, but in the cities with high crime, that makes it difficult to set up a side-by-side comparison to situations in other countries. It's also a combination of those issues that makes the crime problem exceedingly difficult for those cities to address effectively.