Minneapolis Crime? (St. Paul, Cleveland, Gary: violent crime, new home, neighborhoods)

[BreaOC]

I got bored and was wondering the safety rankings of the top 20 largest metros in the US. Below I posted the cities in order of safest to most dangerous city. Considering 1 is the safest and 20 the most dangerous, Minneapolis falls at number 16. I lived in Minneapolis in the Lyndale neighborhood, not a great area but I loved the old architecture. Never realized it when I lived there, but I was surprised that the odds of being the victim of a violent crime is higher in Minneapolis than my home city of LA. I never ran into any problems in Minneapolis, but then I've never run into any in LA either. Common sense will keep the vast majority of people safe
The number to the right of the city is the number of people per 100,000 who fell victim to what the FBI considers violent crimes in the latest public police reports. The higher the number, the higher odds of being a victim. Look at St Louis
NYC 2517
Los Angeles 3505
San Diego 4073
Riverside-San Bernardino 5285
Chicago 5753
Boston 5801
San Francisco 5833
Philadelphia 5837
Washington DC 5919
Phoenix 6672
Miami 6672
Baltimore 6765
Tampa 6792
Houston 7006
Seattle 7483
Minneapolis 7621
Dallas 8063
Atlanta 8188
Detroit 9467
St Louis 14228

[kasperkosmo]

The recent FBI crime stats have been disputed by several cities. Each area is responsible for determining what is a major crime or not and that leads to some areas under reporting crimes.

On the comments about West Virginia, crime, poverty, and urban/rural areas. One reason urban areas will always have higher crime stats is number of police. WV has entire counties with less than 20 total cops. In these poor, rural areas, crime is not less common, just not reported. They just shoot at/ steal/ beat up the offending party themselves later.

[BreaOC]

Originally Posted by kasperkosmo

The recent FBI crime stats have been disputed by several cities. Each area is responsible for determining what is a major crime or not and that leads to some areas under reporting crimes.

I don't understand what there is to dispute, the cities are the source of the numbers the FBI releases. The violent crimes being considered are murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, theft and vehicle theft. All cities report these crimes and report them as violent crimes. Minneapolis and Chicago do not report rapes, so those numers were figured by using the national average of 32 per 100,000 people, although Minneapolis and Chicago surpass the national average in all areas so their actual number of violent crimes may be higher, although it's impossible to verfiy since they do not report.

[kasperkosmo]

The violent crimes being considered are murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, theft and vehicle theft. All cities report these crimes and report them as violent crimes.

That is excatly what the cities in question are saying is wrong. Say Minneapolis considers every theft to be a violent crime while LA only considers those that involve a weapon as a violent crime. By how much would that change the numbers? If LA wants to bring down thier numbers, they simply change the classifcation of robbery's without weapons to nonviolent and thier ranking will improve. The FBI does not apporve of using their statics. See the quote below.

The FBI posted a statement on its Web site criticizing such use of its statistics.
"These rough rankings provide no insight into the numerous variables that mold crime in a particular town, city, county, state, or region," the FBI said. "Consequently, they lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting communities and their residents."
Study Calls Detroit Most Dangerous City, Controversial Analysis Of FBI Stats Pushes Motor City Past St. Louis - CBS News

[BreaOC]

Originally Posted by kasperkosmo

That is excatly what the cities in question are saying is wrong. Say Minneapolis considers every theft to be a violent crime while LA only considers those that involve a weapon as a violent crime. By how much would that change the numbers? If LA wants to bring down thier numbers, they simply change the classifcation of robbery's without weapons to nonviolent and thier ranking will improve. The FBI does not apporve of using their statics. See the quote below.

The FBI posted a statement on its Web site criticizing such use of its statistics.
"These rough rankings provide no insight into the numerous variables that mold crime in a particular town, city, county, state, or region," the FBI said. "Consequently, they lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting communities and their residents."
Study Calls Detroit Most Dangerous City, Controversial Analysis Of FBI Stats Pushes Motor City Past St. Louis - CBS News

There are a few flaws with the source you site. The largest being that the statement made by the FBI is regarding a scoring system created by a private research group's controversial analysis. The numbers I presented were numbers the FBI actually released, not a private party. I personally don't pay attention to any sources that are considered controversial. Also, in your source the report mentions not including the cities of Minneapolis and Chicago because of incomplete data, the lack of the cities reporting the rapes for that year. Another portion of the report you site states that although the aforementioned report is imperfect, "Cities at the top of the list would not be there unless they ranked poorly in all six crime categories".
When the FBI states "The FBI posted a statement on its Web site criticizing such use of its statistics", they are referring to the private parties ranking system, not their own numbers. Logically, why would the FBI officially release numbers they do not believe to be accurate?
Either the news story was interpreted incorrectly or the previous poster was copy/pasting the story to be in benefit of their opinion.

[M504]

Originally Posted by K-Luv

The crack problem was in the 80's, by the way.

you can comment all you want but you will not change the facts or opinions

[M504]

Originally Posted by BreaOC

I got bored and was wondering the safety rankings of the top 20 largest metros in the US. Below I posted the cities in order of safest to most dangerous city. Considering 1 is the safest and 20 the most dangerous, Minneapolis falls at number 16. I lived in Minneapolis in the Lyndale neighborhood, not a great area but I loved the old architecture. Never realized it when I lived there, but I was surprised that the odds of being the victim of a violent crime is higher in Minneapolis than my home city of LA. I never ran into any problems in Minneapolis, but then I've never run into any in LA either. Common sense will keep the vast majority of people safe
The number to the right of the city is the number of people per 100,000 who fell victim to what the FBI considers violent crimes in the latest public police reports. The higher the number, the higher odds of being a victim. Look at St Louis
NYC 2517
Los Angeles 3505
San Diego 4073
Riverside-San Bernardino 5285
Chicago 5753
Boston 5801
San Francisco 5833
Philadelphia 5837
Washington DC 5919
Phoenix 6672
Miami 6672
Baltimore 6765
Tampa 6792
Houston 7006
Seattle 7483
Minneapolis 7621
Dallas 8063
Atlanta 8188
Detroit 9467
St Louis 14228

unless u post a link that is worthless....i just went to morganquinto.com which is the most reliable source and minneapolis isnt even in the top 25...you lied to make ur fake city look hard....you lost

[BreaOC]

I am always more than happy to provide the sources of my information. In fact I apologize for not including it in the original post. My source, which is based on the final 2006 FBI Crime Statistics, is:
Moderator cut: link to a competitors site removed
Unfortunately the FBI's data is always one year behind, the information for 2007 will not be available to the public until October 2008. The way the government determines a fair comparison between cities (because of such large variances in populations) is to offer the number of victims per 100,000 people. In the case of Minneapolis for 2006 the crimes were as such:
Murders- 57
Robbery- 3028
Aggravated Assault- 2836
Burglary- 5826
Larceny Theft- 13110
Vehicle Theft- 3625
Now, as mentioned previously the cities of Minneapolis and Chicago did not report rapes to the FBI, so for both cities I used the national average of 32.2 per 100,000 people (although like I mentioned Minneapolis and Chicago were much higher than the national average in all other areas so that number may be figured on the low side). Consider Minneapolis at the time of report release was 375,302. 32.2 x 3.75302= 121 average rapes. All together Minneapolis reported 28,603 violent crimes. Now the equation is (28,603(crimes)/375,302(population))x100,000=7621 violent crimes per 100,000.
Morganquinto, or CQ Press, is the private third party that issued the report that the FBI is criticizing for misuse of their information.
I'm not trying to bring Minneapolis down. I loved living there and visit a couple times a year when possible. However I'm not going to lie and say the original poster wasn't correct when the numbers overwhelmingly prove it to be true.
In addition to the above, if you go to MQ's website it clearly states, as I mentioned, that Minneapolis and Chicago are not included in any of their rankings because the numbers from those cities were incomplete due to them not meeting the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) guidelines regarding rapes. Care of MQ's website. Hence why you don't see either city in the listings you were looking at. Please do further research before claiming someone who puts so much time into researching the truth is lying.

[Eco84]

Los Angeles looks safer than Minneapolis because geographically, it is way larger than Minneapolis. Minneapolis has 58.4 square miles, while Los Angeles has 498.3 square miles, according to Wikipedia. Hence, the bad areas of LA probably take up a smaller overall percentage of land than they do in Minneapolis. If Minneapolis suddenly annexed a lot of suburban areas to increase its size, the crime rate might look similar to LA's. Minneapolis definately has some rough areas, but they probably look halfway decent compared to what you might find in South Central LA or the South Bronx.

[BreaOC]

The FBI, as I stated, breaks down the numbers by 100,000 to make it all relative city to city no matter the cities population or geographical size. It's a simple equation that unfortunately shows the relatively high crime ratios of many Midwest cities.