Saint Louis is Number 1! Yay, oh, wait....

Since I've received a few emails from family and friends that are obviously worried about my safety and well-being I decided to comment on the new list that came out. "Most Dangerous Cities"

Firstly,
this list is only taking into account the City of Saint Louis ( I'm sure this is applied to all the other cities too). St. Louis only has a population of about 330K in the city. However, the outlying suburbs rack up 980K, almost a million people! So the study was based on crimes per capita, I don't really see it as quite fair that the city is taking the blame just because almost 2/3 of the population doesn't technically live in the city. Anyone who knows much about the way things are run in St. Louis City vs. St. Louis County knows how screwed up the whole city/county border war is. I'm not going to get too deep into this part.

Secondly,
I live in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods right now. At our meeting last week our Neighborhood Stabilization Officer told us that we were somewhere near 2nd - and that our murder rate has increased 300% percent since last year! Sounds fucking scary, doesn't it? Well, to elaborate, the murder rate was 2 last year and this year we've had 6. So, yeah, 300%. That puts things in perspective. I still walk my dog in my neighborhood and have yet to get shot.

And,
that is what truly makes this whole report akin to public defamation in what to me is an unfair statistic.
Then again, it isn't the best, and I did feel way safer when I lived in Oregon and Colorado.

Which brings me to my final thought: I remember awhile back a very heated discussion on Cassie's blog about NYC, and how damn dangerous it is. How it's so much safer in the Midwest. So I thought I'd extract a few interesting examples from the list for amusement. Keep in mind the list is numbered as #1 - the safest to #371 - the worst(St. Louis)

371. St. Louis
356. Kansas City, Mo.
342. Kansas City, Kan. ( I found it interesting the KCK is safer?!)
303. Denver
262. Seattle
249. Portland, Ore.
148. Sioux City, Iowa
145. New York City

Wait....is that right? Sioux City, IA is more dangerous than NYC??
hmmm....apparently this list does not have anything to do with the danger of running into a drag queen at 3 in the morning on the subway, or any other scary culture for that matter....
The other thought that came to my mind was the irony of the city just winning the game and then this report coming out, like someone didn't want the city to get to cocky about being good at something, anything, other than killin, rapin and stealin.