Gangland-St. Louis (Joplin, Rea: crime, home, neighborhood)

[nikotine219]

any1 ever heard of red jehovah bloods?

[Marksman84]

Or how about these guys - I hear that Spanky is a hard dude...

[stlcitygirl]

Spanky is straight street.

[Marksman84]

Originally Posted by stlcitygirl

Spanky is straight street.

Straight outta Moberly...

[Marksman84]

OK, in all seriousness - as a former military firearms trainer - I can't respect any "gang" or armed cadre that holds their firearms like this gentleman below. No wonder you "gangstas" have to empty an entire clip before hitting your target one time, what a waste of ammuntion:

[DinsdalePirahna]

yeah, but it looks so cool when you are capping a crip

[darkbluekey]

I've done a little bit of research and St. Louis is the most dangerous city in the U.S. according to three different sources, one of which is this site. Of course, E. St. Louis is the most dangerous part of the metro area, from what I've read.
Before I knew about all this, a few years ago, I walked around St. Louis by myself in the middle of the night, for a couple hours, and fortunately I didn't get mugged. It may be because I'm six-feet tall and weigh 250 or maybe the area wasn't very dangerous. Interestingly, I've also walked around in London in the middle of the night and wasn't scared at all, even though London has about seven million ppl.

[imperialmog]

Originally Posted by darkbluekey

I've done a little bit of research and St. Louis is the most dangerous city in the U.S. according to three different sources, one of which is this site. Of course, E. St. Louis is the most dangerous part of the metro area, from what I've read.
Before I knew about all this, a few years ago, I walked around St. Louis by myself in the middle of the night, for a couple hours, and fortunately I didn't get mugged. It may be because I'm six-feet tall and weigh 250 or maybe the area wasn't very dangerous. Interestingly, I've also walked around in London in the middle of the night and wasn't scared at all, even though London has about seven million ppl.

Also a big thing that is discussed when you talk about St. Louis and crime is that the nature of the city limits distorts the statistics. The metro area as a whole is actually on the lower end for crime. When you have a city with fixed boundaries and half of the high crime areas of a metro are within its limits, there is going to be some slanted numbers. The fastest way a city can lower its crime rate is just annex low crime areas.

[BoomBoxing]

^That's true but that's only half the story. The relatively low population of the city proper does more to distort the figures than the geographic boundaries.

St. Louis city has roughly 350,000 people and is 66.2 square miles, making up roughly 12.3% of the entire metro area (population). The St. Louis metro area has roughly 2.8 million people and is about 8,846 square miles. Of course other cities don't have their entire MSA's included in their crime statistics either, but many other cities do include large swaths of suburbia in their crime statistics. I bet if you took a 66.2 square mile slice out of many cities, especially bigger cities, you would see their crime statistics shoot through the roof too. That's because there are a lot of nice parts and dangerous parts of other cities, but their large city limits and population dilute those numbers.

The problem I always run into when I point out these obvious facts, is that I am making excuses for crime or pretending crime doesn't exist here. As someone who lives in that tiny 66.2 square mile "dangerous" area, I want nothing more than to lower crime and I am well aware of the crime problems we have here. But I am continually disgusted with how distorting statistics is used to label St. Louis as one of the most dangerous places in the country. I also want to mention that there are plenty of safe neighborhoods within our city limits too, and that the violent crime on the city's north side negatively influences the entire city's crime numbers as well.

A more fair assessment of crime in St. Louis would be to measure St. Louis city + part of St. Louis county, perhaps all of what is inside of the I-270 loop. I imagine we would drop off the top 20 (at least) most dangerous cities. Include all of St. Louis county and I bet St. Louis would rank among the safest cities.

[moorlander]

Well said

or you can point them to this list of most dangrous metropolitan areas. St. Louis is #103.

http://os.cqpress.com/citycrime/2009...9_Rank_Rev.pdf