Is Chicago the worst global city? (East St. Louis, Kansas: crime, how much, neighborhoods)

[Wog_Boy]

Chicago likes to compare itself to other world cities, so Ward Room thought it would find out how we rank in violence.

MOD CUT
Among what are considered Alpha world cities, Chicago has the highest murder rate -- higher even than the Third World metropolises of Mexico City and Sao Paolo.

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[Chicago60614]

I'll stay out of west/south side gangs, cross my fingers and hope for the best. That lowers your chances of getting killed by around 70%.

[marothisu]

The saddest part is that 75% of the murders in Chicago occur in about 25% of the neighborhoods.

[emathias]

Originally Posted by Wog_Boy

Source: MOD CUT

How much do you want to bet that the author of that article is lazy and biased and doesn't know jack about how to compare demographic data, so he compared the murder rate for the city of Chicago with the metro area rates for the international cities? Every American city would look a lot better on that list if you compared metro areas, which is really the only fair way to compare because political boundaries are arbitrary and close to meaningless.

For example, if you included EVERY murder in ALL of Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana to Chicago's metro area population, you'd have a per-100,000 homicide rate of about 8.5, which is less than half of what the article listed for Chicago. And that would include the murders in, but not the population of, Milwaukee, East St. Louis, and Indianapolis in addition to all the smaller places in those three states.

In other words, it's a stupid, dumb list, using stupid, dumb data.

[tribecavsbrowns]

Originally Posted by emathias

How much do you want to bet that the author of that article is lazy and biased and doesn't know jack about how to compare demographic data, so he compared the murder rate for the city of Chicago with the metro area rates for the international cities? Every American city would look a lot better on that list if you compared metro areas, which is really the only fair way to compare because political boundaries are arbitrary and close to meaningless.

For example, if you included EVERY murder in ALL of Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana to Chicago's metro area population, you'd have a per-100,000 homicide rate of about 8.5, which is less than half of what the article listed for Chicago. And that would include the murders in, but not the population of, Milwaukee, East St. Louis, and Indianapolis in addition to all the smaller places in those three states.

In other words, it's a stupid, dumb list, using stupid, dumb data.

I can tell you Toronto's numbers are for the city proper, as are L.A.'s and New York's. Sao Paulo's are for the city proper too, but it looks like they're from last year, and homicides are up about 20 percent there this year according to news reports.

There are reasons for Chicago's high homicide rate that aren't going away any time soon, so I'm not going to freak out over it, but I'm not going to rant about others doing statistical gymnastics to make Chicago look bad, because they're not.

[emathias]

Originally Posted by tribecavsbrowns

I can tell you Toronto's numbers are for the city proper, as are L.A.'s and New York's. Sao Paulo's are for the city proper too, but it looks like they're from last year, and homicides are up about 20 percent there this year according to news reports.

There are reasons for Chicago's high homicide rate that aren't going away any time soon, so I'm not going to freak out over it, but I'm not going to rant about others doing statistical gymnastics to make Chicago look bad, because they're not.

It still doesn't matter.

Toronto proper takes up half of their metro area.

Chicago proper takes up less than 30% of the metro area.

Using arbitrary political boundaries only confuses the issue. Yes, Chicago has a lot of murders, but it's like choosing only the eastern half of China because that's where the cities people have heard of are to say that China has a better per-capita GDP than Mexico does. When you start using arbitrary political boundaries to compare things, you end up with skew. If you don't even MENTION that in a list, then it becomes an intentional skew.

You can defend that as being accurate, because in certain ways it is, and you can point out that Chicago has a lot of murders, which it does, but creating data that intentionally skews the data and makes it worse than it actually is, at the very least, irresponsible journalism.

[Chicago South Sider]

Chicago has a higher murder rate than Sao Paulo?? That's just embarrassing.

[aragx6]

^This.

Previously agreed upon designations for what constitutes an urban area and comparing urban area to urban area is really the only way to be fair.

For the record, this is exactly why St. Louis at 61 sq miles gets a bum deal when compared to Memphis (313 sq/miles) or Kansas City (316 sq/miles) in the crime rankings. Everybody's average rate looks lower when you include many many miles of pure suburbia as both Memphis and KC do.

[rca215]

The comments on the article itself (not this C-D thread), like most comment sections on the internet, are a mix of amusing, befuddling and infuriating.

I'm not sure how I would feel about myself if I celebrated murder/crime in a region because it on average doesn't adhere to my beliefs on gun control or politics in general, which seems to be a common perspective in those comments.

[ERS-One]

Saw this on reddit:

Interactive Map: The U.S. Shooting Epidemic - The Daily Beast