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Seeing as how New York and Los Angeles both have never had murder rates of 40 per 100,000, neither are in the running for most dangerous city, of any era. Sure, we can extrapolate specific neighborhoods within each city, but we can do that with EVERY city...
Washington, D.C had a rate of 80.6 in 1991. That doesn't even include Prince George's County outside of DC which would add about another 80-100 murders that year if including the eastern suburbs. I dont know if this list is some cities vs entire metro areas. But it was DC and Atlanta Ga the with the highest murder rate and crime rate.
The urban area of Washington is much larger than DC, there's no reason why you would leave it off. It was just over 18 per 100,000 during 1991, lower than Houston or Dallas that year.
Check the urban area population, what's wrong with this picture? We're using admin. divisions with the word 'city' in them, which is different from being a CITY. The two are used synonymously but are often two very different things. If we mean what we say then London in the UK is a city of 7,000 people. Westminster is an adjacent London borough and it's a city as well, because it's name is the City of Westminster.
In fact, London is larger than Greater London as one of the posters correctly pointed out in response to my comment. So that's another problem. There's a definition of the London urban area which is over 10 million. Some neutrally-sourced approximations have the metro as somewhere between 10 and 15 million.
A lot of talk about how DC is a small city and can't be compared to Chicago.
The city to metro population ratio of Chicago in the early 90s was 1 in 2.9.
DC's city to metro population ratio was 1 in 6.8.
To make Chicago and DC's city to metro population ratio equivalent, DC would've needed 1.4 million people.
With 600k people, DC had 479 homicides in 91. Even if DC had 1.4 million people and 0 additional homicides, 479 homicides would make the rate 34/100k. Still higher than Chicago's rate of 33/100k.
So to make DC about 1.4 million = add DC and PG County together (600k + 726k = 1.3 million).
PG County had 154 homicides in 1991. Almost all right close to the DC border. So if you wanted to cut PG County in half and add some of Montgomery County or Arlington or whatever you can, it wouldn't affect these numbers much.
479 + 154 = 633 homicides with 1.3 million people. 48.7/100k
So I think DC was worse than Chicago no matter how you cut it.
Even off metro area DC was worse than Chicagoland.
North East Brooklyn and South Eastern Queens had very bad neighborhoods as well. I know most of Harlem (East, Central, West) had murder rates ranging from 88 to about 110 per 100,000 ..this with 600,000+ people, so the size of a small city.
Agreed, if Harlem/South Bronx was a city by itself it would account for somewhere in the neighborhood of 700K. The murder rate would probably be around 95 per 100K. A lot of bad Brooklyn neighborhoods at the time I believe were around the high 60s to low 80s. Queens had Rockaways and Jamaica (including Southside). Harlem/South Bronx was probably the most dangerous part of NYC in the 80s and 90s. I had relatives who lived in a nicer part of Jamaica during the time and said random crimes (cars broken into very often, occasional violent crimes) still happened here and there although there were certain regions of the neighborhood where if you went past certain landmarks, it became shadier and were places you didn't wander off into during the nighttime if you didn't have to. I've been to South Jamaica a few years ago near the housing projects and it didn't seem all too unsafe during the daytime. Just a little rundown.
South Central in LA had the stigma of gang violence/murder even through the early 2000s as shown in some movies. Chicago now has probably the worst gang problem of any major city but at one point, LA especially South Central was a war zone in certain areas. Cousins grew up in Oakland and even as a little kid, I could see they grew up in one of the "safer" neighborhoods but a lot of the main streets used to be full of street racers and the occasional people hanging out on the corners.
Times have definitely changed across America since the early-mid 90s.
Last edited by mosdefinitely; 04-09-2016 at 01:51 PM..
When i think of the 90s,The biggest moments that stand out the most are from New York & Los Angeles Easily.
New York put up over 2000 plus murders in 1990,Los Angeles County also put up 2000 plus murders & than citywide with 1000 homicides consecutively from 91-93,With 92 registering the worst uprising in American history.
Than to top it all off,New York & Los Angeles was in a big coastal war that took the lives of the biggest Rap stars in Tupac Shakur & Christopher Wallace.Im sure other cities were bad also but New York & Los Angeles was just on another level in the 90s & you could see how strict the laws are in both those cities today.Police chief Bratton was even sent to Los Angeles to bring his New York tactics lol,Which of course didn't work but still both cities are under extreme laws today !
When i think of the 90s,The biggest moments that stand out the most are from New York & Los Angeles Easily.
New York put up over 2000 plus murders in 1990,Los Angeles County also put up 2000 plus murders & than citywide with 1000 homicides consecutively from 91-93,With 92 registering the worst uprising in American history.
Than to top it all off,New York & Los Angeles was in a big coastal war that took the lives of the biggest Rap stars in Tupac Shakur & Christopher Wallace.Im sure other cities were bad also but New York & Los Angeles was just on another level in the 90s & you could see how strict the laws are in both those cities today.Police chief Bratton was even sent to Los Angeles to bring his New York tactics lol,Which of course didn't work but still both cities are under extreme laws today !
Don't really agree with that but in terms of big cities, Chicago was actually statistically more dangerous than both NY/LA.
The NY/LA beef though was very well known during the time and NYC started to clean up around 1994 and onwards when Guliani took over. Then slowly and slowly it got safer under Guliani. Crime still was moderately high until maybe the 21st century or so.
Don't really agree with that but in terms of big cities, Chicago was actually statistically more dangerous than both NY/LA.
The difference was only about 2 or 3/100k at their peaks. There were quite a few years in the 80s and early 90s that Chicago didn't have the highest murder rate between the three.
Yeah Chicago population was just lower so that pushed their rates a little higher,But even in 1980 when Los Angeles was still less populated than Chicago it still had over a 1000 homicides.Crack & Gang wars was the reason behind it.I don't know if Crack hit hard in Chicago like it did in New York, Los Angeles or Miami.
But facts still remains that in the 90s,New York & Los Angeles was a different beast.Chicago worse years in the 90s was 92 & 93 with 900 plus murders.Thats nowhere near as bad as Los Angeles, Where you still have to factor in the surrounding cities of Compton,Long
Beach,East L.A,etc.New York probably the same with the Bronx,Harlem & Brooklyn ( Vietnam ) Being the worse areas.
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