The Most Dangerous Cities in America

After falling for five consecutive years, the
number of violent crimes across the
United States rose by 1.2% in 2012.
Based on data published by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the
increase was even greater in some of
America’s largest cities. In 2012, for the
third year in a row, Flint, Michigan had
the highest violent crime rate in the
country.
According to the FBI, violent crime
includes murder, nonnegligent
manslaughter, rape, robbery and
aggravated assault. In some cases, the
cities with the highest violent crime rate,
including Flint and Oakland, had high rates
in all four categories. However, most of
the most violent cities tend to do very
poorly only in a few categories. Based on
the FBI Uniform Crime Report, these are
the 10 most dangerous cities in America.
Click here to see the 10 most
dangerous cities
Crime in these cities is typically not
limited to just violent crime. Three cities
— Birmingham, St. Louis and Oakland —
were among the 10 worst cities in the
nation for both violent crime and
property crime. In some of the most
dangerous cities, specific types of
property crime were especially common.
Flint and Cleveland had among the
highest burglary rates, while Oakland,
Detroit and St. Louis had among the
highest rates of vehicle theft.
The economies of many of the most
dangerous cities have been in bad shape
for years, in some cases long before the
Great Recession. The populations of many
of the most dangerous cities declined,
leaving behind highly impoverished urban
centers. The loss of economic diversity,
explained John Roman, senior fellow at
the Urban institute, only serves to
exacerbate crime in cities like Detroit,
Flint, Cleveland and St. Louis.
In fact, all the 10 most dangerous cities
had poverty rates above the national rate
of 15.9% in 2011. In half of these cities,
more than 30% of the population lived in
poverty. Detroit and Flint had poverty
rates of more than 40%. “It is very clear
that poverty in particular is associated
with higher crime rates,” explained
Roman.
However, the relationship between the
two is less certain. It is “very difficult to
say whether crime makes places poorer,
or poverty causes more crime,” Roman
noted.
In many of the nation’s most dangerous
cities, unemployment is also extremely
high. Seven of the 10 cities with the
highest levels of violent crime had
unemployment rates above 10% in 2012,
much higher than the national
unemployment rate of 8.1% that year. In
two cities, Detroit and Stockton, the
unemployment rate was more than 18%
last year.
Low educational attainment also goes
hand-in-hand with high crime rates. In all
of the 10 most dangerous cities, the
percentage of adults with a high school
diploma was below the 86% national
average. In five of these metro areas, the
percentage of adults with a diploma was
below 80%.
On its website, the FBI instructs readers
to avoid comparing city violence because
rankings tend to be simplistic and ignore
factors that influence crime, as well as the
different ways crimes are measured and
reported. For this reason, Roman
cautioned against directly comparing cities
based on their individual crime rates.
However, because the cities with the
highest and lowest violent crime rates
have remained consistent for many years,
he believes comparing city ranks was
useful.
Based on the FBI’s Preliminary Annual
Uniform Crime Report, 24/7 Wall St.
identified the 10 U.S. cities with
populations of 100,000 or more with the
highest rates of violent crime per 100,000
residents. Using estimated populations
and crime incidents from the FBI, which
measures incidents of eight types of
violent and nonviolent crime for 2012,
24/7 Wall St. calculated the incidence of
the four types of violent crime per
100,000 persons for that year: murder,
forcible rape, robbery and aggravated
assault. In addition to crime data, 24/7
Wall St. reviewed median income and
poverty rates for these cities from the
U.S. Census Bureau’s American
Community Survey for 2011, the most
recent available year. We also included
average 2012 unemployment rates for
these cities from the B