For the second year in a row, Detroit, Michigan and Irvine, California are the Most Dangerous and Safest cities in the America, respectively. Law Street’s comprehensive analysis of the FBI’s latest Uniform Crime Report allowed us to rank the safest and the most dangerous big cities in the United States.

Click here to see the Top 10 Most Dangerous Cities with populations over 200,000.

Click here to see the Top 10 Most Dangerous Cities with populations under 200,000.

Click here to see the Top 10 Safest Cities with populations over 200,000.

Detroit has a violent crime rate of 2,072 per 100,000 people; Irvine has a violent crime rate of 48 per 100,000 people. Looking at those statistics alone begs the question: how could two sizable cities in the same country be so radically different?

At the end of the day it comes down to pretty much one thing: the economy. While there are significantly more factors that need to be taken into consideration when trying to figure out why one city is so crime-ridden and another so relatively safe, a lot of it boils down to the economy.

Detroit currently has an unemployment rate of 14.9 percent; Irvine’s is about 4 percent. Keep in mind that the national unemployment rate has dropped to 5.8 percent, which means that while Irvine is doing pretty well, Detroit is doing very, very poorly. In Detroit, 38.1 percent of the population is below the poverty line, in Irvine it’s just 11.4 percent.

In some ways, it seems that the two cities are from two different times in American history. Detroit was once a booming manufacturing city, home of the auto industry. But the problem is that it was really only the home of the auto industry. And when it first took on that characteristic, the process required way more people to make a car than it does now. There’s also the issue of foreign automakers surpassing American brands, and the 2008 financial collapse. Long, sad story short, Detroit has not been able to subsist on just one industry for a very long time, and it shows.

Compare that to Irvine, which in many ways is the epitome of the way our economy looks now. It’s smack dab in the middle of Southern California’s answer to Silicon Valley, with a heavy concentration on technology and startup culture. Irvine is a city that has taken advantage of the new industries providing jobs in the American market, much like Detroit did, but half a century later.

Detroit’s downfall is more troubling than just the economic woes–when the city started to decline and see mass unemployment, many of those who had the resources to do so got out. Over the last decade, Detroit’s population has fallen by approximately a quarter. It’s turned into a vicious cycle–people who have the resources to leave Detroit do so because of its poor economic condition and crime. Those with financial resources leaving make the city’s economy and budget problems worse, and they can’t pay for the kind of revitalization Detroit would need, or a police force to get the crime under control. So more people leave, and the cycle continues.

Put very simply,  Irvine is safer because it has the money coming in to be that way. In addition to its regular police force, the multiple universities located within city limits have their own police forces, leading to even more of a focus on safety. There are a lot of things that separate Detroit and Irvine, and makes one clock in as the most dangerous city in the country and the other the safest. At the end of the day one of the most convincing is the economy.

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Detroit is the Most Dangerous City in America, Irvine the Safest appeared first on Law Street.

America is a nation of lists. We rate and rank colleges and universities, hospitals, school systems, governmental entities, college football teams, movies, songs (with a bullet), and just about anything else that matters to us, from the frivolous to the most serious.

And crime is one rating that really matters to all of us.

Law Street’s Crime in America utilizes the FBI’s comprehensive collection of crime statistics from 286 American cities to provide a valuable perspective on personal safety in the United States. The FBI releases these statistics annually, and in doing so it performs a significant public service. We at Law Street are engaged in a journalistic service of our own by analyzing and further disseminating the FBI’s results.

If the past is a guide, our Crime in America rankings will be met with criticism by cities with high crime rates and welcomed by those deemed safest. Scholars who rely on the FBI data as the starting point for their own analyses will nonetheless register their objections. Even the FBI hasn’t been spared this criticism, to the point where the agency now even publishes its own disclaimer.  We, too, repeat the FBI’s disclaimer.

Criminologists have received millions of dollars from the federal government in recent years to tell the FBI how it could do a better job of crime data gathering and dissemination – you can read one such report for yourself and see whether it is worth the $4.5 million that the Justice Department paid for it. Looking at that report, one thing that stands out is that the researchers could not easily come to terms with how to make the FBI’s reporting better or more meaningful. And that is not surprising, because crime is as much about perception as it is about reality. A city with some very safe streets may still rank among the most dangerous overall. And although rankings alone cannot tell the whole story, there is still a certain validity to them from a purely qualitative level. Where do you feel safer: strolling the streets of Flint, or Irvine?

In the end, the rankings are what they are – imperfect measures, but illuminating nevertheless. And although some cities may argue against them in order to protect tourism dollars – a few years ago, St. Louis business interests spent $500,000 on a PR campaign against the crime rankings – those same cities also use the rankings to their advantage, to argue for more resources with which to fight such high levels of crime. In fact, that is exactly what is happening in St. Louis. Once ranked Most Dangerous, it was the only city in the Top 10 this year where violent crime significantly dropped.

Acknowledging the limitations of the FBI data doesn’t mean the agency’s reporting is without great value. In fact, the crime data gathered by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program is used by states and localities to target crime-fighting resources, and by the federal government to direct billions of dollars in federal taxpayer dollars to local police forces who urgently need the funding.  Without the FBI’s crime data, such federal programs could not exist; crime-fighting accountability would be weakened; and the public would be denied its right to know. That is why we rank.

Click here to read more Crime in America coverage.

John A. Jenkins

John A. Jenkins is Founder & CEO of Law Street Media. Contact John at jjenkins@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Why We Rank: The Public’s Right to Know appeared first on Law Street.