Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
The right wing loves to hate Chicago because both Hillary and Obama come from there.
Thus, their overused trope about gun violence in Chicago (and the accompanying crocodile tears over the dead - we know they don't care) is something they deep down need to believe no matter what the facts say about how safe the city is.
The study is conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and ranks the top 60 safest cities in the world. Only three US cities made the list's top 20, including Chicago.
Now, you may wonder. The other two cities must be from down-to-earth, peaceful, Bible-thumbing Red states right??! Must be Dallas, Pheonix, etc, right??? Wrong. They are blue states cities San Francisco and Los Angeles.
But how can that be? We all keep hearing how dangerous Chicago is!!! This can't be!!
Fact is, Chicago has certain areas that you want to avoid; but they also have many many safe and gorgeous neighborhoods. The right-wing, as typical, only cares about the Chicago that is south of 59th St. and they shout/repeat until you think all of Chicago is like the area south of 59th St.
And this is one point that I made before - Chicago is still much safer than most areas in red states. Essentially the worst of the Blue is still better than the best of the Red. This is what many of us need to remember.
The study is conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and ranks the top 60 safest cities in the world. Only three US cities made the list's top 20, including Chicago.
Now, you may wonder. The other two cities must be from down-to-earth, peaceful, Bible-thumbing Red states right??! Must be Dallas, Pheonix, etc, right??? Wrong. They are blue states cities San Francisco and Los Angeles.
But how can that be? We all keep hearing how dangerous Chicago is!!! This can't be!!
Fact is, Chicago has certain areas that you want to avoid; but they also have many many safe and gorgeous neighborhoods. The right-wing, as typical, only cares about the Chicago that is south of 59th St. and they shout/repeat until you think all of Chicago is like the area south of 59th St.
And this is one point that I made before - Chicago is still much safer than most areas in red states. Essentially the worst of the Blue is still better than the best of the Red. This is what many of us need to remember.
A by-product of socialism, is violent crimes.
In our own states, it is the socialist run and fascist police state control, cities. They are the killing fields.
Cuba, which is an actual “socialist”, communist society is not a violent country. To say Communist countries are the most violent is a lie.
Now, this poster seems to have issue with the data being crunched (I think, although he didn't really say anything explicit). To use Personal Safety as an example: the study uses crime data, police engagement, community patrolling, political stability, crime prevention, etc. Does that sound like the wrong data to use???? Crime? Police engagement? Prevention?? Those are not the right data for personal safety?? Then why don't you tell us what they should have used?
.
It has more to do with the weighting though. The difference between the lowest violent crime city in the world and the highest violent crime city in the world is 0.16% in the rating. And, ironically, the only stat that considers homicide at all is the homicide gender ratio which has a higher weight that all other violent crime combined (homicide makes up a very small portion of all violent crime, especially compared to simple assault, so it has essentially zero impact on violent crime rates). Since Chicago's murder victims are so predominantly young males, it scores the best possible score on homicide gender ratio, completely offsetting the entire violent crime rating.
In other words, Chicago could have 50,000 murders a year, but as long as nearly all of those murders are young males, they come out as an average city for that element of personal safety.
Meanwhile, having a police engagement plan (which is a function of police funding), having digital crime data (again, a function of funding), using data-driven techniques (still a function of funding), each separately counts for 1.4% of the rating. By spending a lot of money, Chicago gets a perfect score on those and earns 4.2%, but gets penalized a max 0.32% for their actual crime rates regardless of how high those are.
But the infrastructure score really throws the list off. The difference between San Francisco and just New York, 2nd to SF in the US, is 0.7%. That difference, not the total weight but just the difference, is equal to double the maximum points you can get for a low crime rate. (The difference between SF and Dallas, lowest in the US, is 3%, over 9x the weight of all violent and petty crime combined.) And what drives the infrastructure score? Half the category is just public spending, and the other half is driven by frequency of traffic accidents and natural disasters.
This whole index is basically a proxy for government spending and indirectly for level of wealth. The entire top of the list is wealthy cities, and only 2 wealthier cities even crack the bottom third of the list, Jeddah and Riyadh, both with very low government spending and extremely high income inequality issues.
Last edited by marigolds6; 10-22-2017 at 08:38 AM..
"Data used for this research are 1) the number of murders reported to the FBI to have occurred in each city, and 2) the population of each city."
Any list based on FBI UCR before 2017 will not include Chicago at all, because Chicago refused to conform to FBI standards on the reporting of violent crime (specifically on the definition of rape) until this year. So, the FBI left them off of their public datasets completely. (Based on when those posts were published, they had to be based on 2016 or earlier.)
The same FBI ranks it in UCR as a mid tier city.
...
You can look it up for yourself the FBI will publish city limits but safety is always and has always been measured by metropolitan areas just because you don’t understand statistics doesn’t mean it is a spin.
UCR doesn't rank cities and never has.
Coming from St Louis, I can tell you that no one ever uses metro areas to rank crime rates. (If they did, someone would notice that St Louis is less than 300k people and 62 sq mi in the middle of a 3M people metro area covering 8400 sq mi. But no one ever does and it always tops the murder and violent crime lists every year.)
Again when it is a fact that all major cities are blue, you have no argument. It's like arguing the biggest swans in the world are a species of bird. Well all Swans are birds...
I love how everyone ignored my actual statistics about Chicago by the FBI that puts Chicago as a mid-tier city? Or are you guys so intellectually dishonest that you will continue to push the lie that Chicago is the most dangerous city in the U.S or even one of the most dangerous, and ignore facts.
Here is the FBI stats ranked by metropolitan area. If you don't understand why metropolitan area is used, I explained it in my last post for collecting statistics, now if you have a problem with experts using metropolitan area over city limits then you can argue that. But I will repeat it one more time: Chicago is actually one of the safer cities worldwide (although this ranking is indeed B.S since it only ranks 60 cities).
That's from 2015, before Chicago converted to conforming violent crime rates. But again, no one uses MSA to evaluate individual cities or else St Louis would also be a "mid-tier" city.
You can use MSA to evaluate MSA, but you cannot use an MSA to extrapolate down to an individual city in that MSA.
"Chicago Named One of the Safest Cities in the World"
Ask a black person in Auburn, Gresham, Austin or Garfield Park how they feel about this. Or do we not care what those people think?
Let's look at the numbers.
The population in the above named neighborhoods is around 177,000 out of a city with 2.7 million people. This does not include 1 million + who work in the city and live elsewhere or the 50 million tourists who visit the city, each year.
Large employers have been leaving suburban corporate parks for the city to attract and retain educated and skilled Millennial employees.
The majority of homicide occurs in 5/25 police districts in the city.
Despite high absolute numbers of murders, the rate does not clear the top ten, in the US.
As you probably know, populations in these 4 neighborhoods has substantially declined since their peaks.
The criteria used in this study is one of many ways of evaluating safety. Not necessarily the criteria I would use.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
