Quote:
Originally Posted by California Skeleton
I'm an ex Chicagoan and a widower because my wife was stabbed, robbed, and murdered in Chicago 3 years ago. Bled on the pavements and no one did anything to help her. Don't preach to me about its pathetic crime and don't preach to me that it's improving because that's a farce. You're comparing metro Chicago's murder rate to smaller cities to hide behind iron curtains. It's right behind Philly and Detroit and your not listing the growth in Chicago metro last year it was 20k. When I moved in Chicago the economy was bad and lots of foreclosures. Economists compared it to Detroit and Nevada.
I don't hate Chicago but I don't have any reason to love it anymore
|
That really really sucks - sorry for your loss. What you are doing though is common sometimes. Just because an event happened to you does not mean you can invalidate actual facts. Facts are still facts. I never once said that there's no homicide or that the rate is extremely low. I said that the homicide rate is not top 10 (fact) and has been cut in half since the early 90s (fact).
Improvement is not a farce for the homicide rate as it's been steadily improving since the early 1990s, which is another fact you can readily look up from the FBI. The early 90s saw over double the number of homicides that we've seen in the last large handful of years. I'm also not comparing Metro homicide rates. I'm comparing city homicide rates. And this is why rates exist - because things are unlike size and you need a percentage. That's why it's stupid to compare raw numbers. If I was comparing raw numbers, you'd have a point. But homicide rate? No, you are wrong in this case. Rates exist for the very reason of comparing things of dissimilar sizes.
Regarding Detroit: I've done this already comparing to Detroit and you're still wrong. What I'm going to do for you is this. I'm going to take the average number of homicides per community area in Chicago from 2006 - 2013 and get the average per 100K rate for each. Then I am going to sort by the rate descending and take the community areas that have the absolute highest homicide rates, and add them up to the nearest I can get to Detroit's population of 717,000. It's still not as dangerous as Detroit. Remember, this is calculating for 2006-2013 (8 years):
* West Garfield Park | 18001 people | 130 total homicides | 77.079 per 100k rate avg
* Washington Park | 11717 people | 85 total homicides | 69.344 per 100k rate avg
* Englewood | 30654 people | 197 total homicides | 63.613 per 100k rate avg
* West Englewood | 35505 people | 217 total homicides | 62.315 per 100k rate avg
* Greater Grand Crossing | 32602 people | 202 total homicides | 62.113 per 100k rate avg
* Riverdale | 6482 people | 36 total homicides | 57.853 per 100k rate avg
* Burnside | 2916 people | 14 total homicides | 55.727 per 100k rate avg
* East Garfield Park | 20567 people | 96 total homicides | 50.445 per 100k rate avg
* North Lawndale | 35912 people | 186 total homicides | 49.774 per 100k rate avg
* West Pullman | 29651 people | 134 total homicides | 45.108 per 100k rate avg
* Chatham | 31028 people | 127 total homicides | 42.703 per 100k rate avg
* South Chicago | 31198 people | 124 total homicides | 40.868 per 100k rate avg
* Fuller Park | 2876 people | 14 total homicides | 39.117 per 100k rate avg
* Humboldt Park | 56323 people | 203 total homicides | 39.06 per 100k rate avg
* Woodlawn | 25983 people | 93 total homicides | 38.487 per 100k rate avg
* South Shore | 49767 people | 192 total homicides | 37.676 per 100k rate avg
* Roseland | 44619 people | 159 total homicides | 36.98 per 100k rate avg
* Grand Boulevard | 21929 people | 76 total homicides | 36.481 per 100k rate avg
* Auburn Gresham | 48743 people | 164 total homicides | 35.39 per 100k rate avg
* New City | 44377 people | 150 total homicides | 34.365 per 100k rate avg
* Austin | 98514 people | 339 total homicides | 34.259 per 100k rate avg
* Avalon Park | 10185 people | 28 total homicides | 30.682 per 100k rate avg
* Washington Heights | 26493 people | 75 total homicides | 30.668 per 100k rate avg
* TOTAL | 716,042 people | 43.398 per 100k rate average
* Detroit | 713,777 people | 54.6 per 100K rate (2012)
I hope you understood what I did here. These are the absolute worst homicide areas of Chicago for the last 8 years, added up in equal to Detroit's population and it's still over 11 per 100K lower than Detroit. That is even counting Detroit's good areas. In no way am I saying that there's no homicide in Chicago or it's not that much - of course it is and it is still way too high. It's tragic **** going on still no matter who gets killed, especially over what seem like small matters to us. However, the data tells us that the homicide rates have drastically decreased since the early 90s.
You can also read a study done by an Associate Professor at Yale where he analyzed crime data from 1965 to 2013 and concluded that the crime rate is basically the lowest the city has seen since the early 1970s:
http://www.papachristos.org/Welcome_...ngPaper023.pdf
I'm sorry for your loss, again. That really blows, but in the end it doesn't invalidate any data. If you have a problem with it, take it up with the FBI and talk to the professor at Yale about it.
Regarding population, Chicago lost 200,000 people between the last two censuses, so an abrupt estimated population gain after that loss? It's good. The metro area has also never lost population at any single census. Also, population doesn't dictate how good or bad a city is. In that case, we'd conclude that Karachi, Pakistan is better than NYC because its population is greater by 5 million people.