It Depends On What The Definition Of ‘City’ Is
16 11 2006
The East-West Gateway Coordinating Council, the St. Louis area’s Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO), has released a study proving that St. Louis isn’t the most violent city.
The way they did this was to redefine “city.”
EWGCC compared metropolitan areas, as defined by the Census Bureau. It found that, among the 32 largest metropolitan areas, St. Louis is the 23rd most dangerous.
However, the goofy part about comparing “metropolitan areas” is that the Census Bureau too readily adds counties to a “metro area,” simply to inflate the urban pride of big cities. For instance, as you can see on the above image of the counties that the Census Bureau defines as “St. Louis,” it’s obvious that a vast majority of this territory isn’t anywhere near urbanized.
I hardly think that anyone in Courtois, Missouri, in far southwestern Washington County, or in Virden, Illinois, in far northeastern Macoupin County (it’s actually far closer to Springfield), consider themselves to be St. Louisans. Yet, crimes (or the lack thereof) in Courtois or Virden are used by the EWGCC to make St. Louis City look good.
The original study that ranked St. Louis as the most violent city never pretended to compare anything but incorporated cities with population over (I believe) 100,000. In many metro areas, there are multiple incorporated cities that meet the criteria, so you can have multiple entries from such places.
For instance, the Arizona “Valley of the Sun” region (i.e. Phoenix-Mesa, AZ, according to Census), had eight cities that appeared in the cities-and-crime study, those being Mesa, Chandler, Peoria, Phoenix, Scottsdale, Gilbert, Glendale, and Tempe. Because the St. Louis area has no cities other than St. Louis with more than 100,000 people (St. Charles, the second biggest city in the metro area, is about 62,000), that was the only city that appeared in the results.
[...] could vote. Since Mayor Slay wants to make St. Louis City seem more crime-free than it actually is by manipulating metropolitan area crime statistics, it’s [...]