America's top 5 deadliest cities

[Amp]

Wow, Louisiana had two:

https://www.foxnews.com/us/deadliest-u-s-cities

[RevolverRob]

Murder Rate - While a useful statistic, doesn't really encapsulate murder/homicide probability. The rate is just homicides-per-100,000 residents. This can artificially inflate the rates for smaller cities and artificially deflate the rates for larger ones.

That's the reason why Chicago, which had 516 homicides in 2019, didn't make the list, but Baton Rouge with 87 homicides did.

I'll also note that the article conflates murder with homicide. They are distinct, all murders are homicides, but not all homicides are murders.

If you correct for the distribution of homicides, which is not random, by adjusting the rate to reflect the populations of given neighborhoods/regions - you will discover that homicide rates are extremely high in certain areas, but very low in others. For instance, in Chicago's Austin neighborhood, there were 54 homicides in 2019, the population of that neighborhood is ~97.5k people. If we just use the standard per 100,000 people, the single neighborhood of Austin has a homicide rate higher than that of the city of Baltimore. The neighborhood of Austin is 7.16 square miles, the city of Baltimore is 92.5 square miles...That is an area that is about 1/12th the size of a city with a comparable murder rate...

By comparison the homicide rate in my neighborhood, which is also in Chicago, in 2019 that rate was 0 in 25,000....

[Rex G]

Obviously, it is the Mississippi River we should blame. Three of the top five cities are by the Mississippi River.

Actually, I am not joking. My wife just said that the presence of a deep, dark river is actually a known factor in homicidal behavior. She told me that an instructor taught this, in a class she attended. (My wife worked 21 years as a death scene investigator for the Harris County, Texas M.E.)

[blues]

We need some mood music to go with all this blood...


https://youtu.be/oJH24ktbsFo

[OlongJohnson]

My wife just said that the presence of a deep, dark river is actually a known factor in homicidal behavior. She told me that an instructor taught this, in a class she attended. (My wife worked 21 years as a death scene investigator for the Harris County, Texas M.E.)

It's the mosquitoes, no doubt. They make every minute outdoors suck for people who attract them.

[Maple Syrup Actual]

Obviously, it is the Mississippi River we should blame. Three of the top five cities are by the Mississippi River.

Actually, I am not joking. My wife just said that the presence of a deep, dark river is actually a known factor in homicidal behavior. She told me that an instructor taught this, in a class she attended. (My wife worked 21 years as a death scene investigator for the Harris County, Texas M.E.)

That's really interesting. I wonder whether that's opportunistic - I can get rid of the body - or an actual psychological driver that draws the mind to dark places.

I would guess opportunistic but as a writer with a particular interest in exploring murderous urges, I prefer the latter.

[blues]

https://youtu.be/LFlUZIERb4s

[Rex G]

That's really interesting. I wonder whether that's opportunistic - I can get rid of the body - or an actual psychological driver that draws the mind to dark places.

I would guess opportunistic but as a writer with a particular interest in exploring murderous urges, I prefer the latter.

I asked my wife if she remembered the instructor’s name, or the source material. She does not remember. It was some time in the Nineties, and the statement was was a conversational remark made during a lunch break, not actually part of the curriculum. The remark was about dreary, dirty areas near deep, dark rivers, and was actually spoken in St Louis.

Here, in the Houston, Texas area, there is no one large river, but plenty of bodies do end up in the numerous bayous. Buffalo Bayou was dredged, to be made large and deep enough for shipping, only as far the the Port Of Houston, so not nearly into the inner-city. The “ship channel area” was quite dangerous, in the Seventies/Eighties, but the greater Houston area has several really dangerous areas, which shift, over time.

[Dan_S]

That's really interesting. I wonder whether that's opportunistic - I can get rid of the body - or an actual psychological driver that draws the mind to dark places.

I would guess opportunistic but as a writer with a particular interest in exploring murderous urges, I prefer the latter.

Suicide rates tend to be higher in places with a lot of wind.

I think there’s something more than ‘opportunity’ in the mix there.

[mtnbkr]

Surprised Richmond wasn't on that list after last Monday's excitement. :rolleyes:

Chris

[RevolverRob]

I asked my wife if she remembered the instructor’s name, or the source material. She does not remember. It was some time in the Nineties, and the statement was was a conversational remark made during a lunch break, not actually part of the curriculum. The remark was about dreary, dirty areas near deep, dark rivers.

Here, in the Houston, Texas area, there is no one large river, but plenty of bodies do end up in the numerous bayous. Buffalo Bayou was dredged, to be made large and deep enough for shipping, only as far the the Port Of Houston, so not nearly into the inner-city. The “ship channel area” was quite dangerous, in the Seventies/Eighties, but the greater Houston area has several really dangerous areas, which shift, over time.

The Texas Killing Fields (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Killing_Fields_(location)) spring to mind as a place where the dark and deep aspects of the

Apparently - there has been some progress on some of the unsolved murders in that area - https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/04/17/bodies-found-killing-fields-haunted-southeast-texas-decades-will-new-clues-lead-suspect/ -

[Maple Syrup Actual]

I asked my wife if she remembered the instructor’s name, or the source material. She does not remember. It was some time in the Nineties, and the statement was was a conversational remark made during a lunch break, not actually part of the curriculum. The remark was about dreary, dirty areas near deep, dark rivers, and was actually spoken in St Louis.

Here, in the Houston, Texas area, there is no one large river, but plenty of bodies do end up in the numerous bayous. Buffalo Bayou was dredged, to be made large and deep enough for shipping, only as far the the Port Of Houston, so not nearly into the inner-city. The “ship channel area” was quite dangerous, in the Seventies/Eighties, but the greater Houston area has several really dangerous areas, which shift, over time.

Now that's satisfyingly atmospheric...if there ends up being anything further to the story I'm curious to hear it.




Suicide rates tend to be higher in places with a lot of wind.

I think there’s something more than ‘opportunity’ in the mix there.

Probably and also interesting...unless, I guess, it's just that bridge jumpers usually hesitate for a bit, then choose life...unless it's windy.

[RevolverRob]

I would guess the wind thing is correlation, not causation.

Areas with more wind are also likely to have more cloud cover and less solar energy/less light. We know that less daylight/less solar energy can be directly related to higher incidence of depression (e.g., SADS). Depression is certainly strongly causally linked with suicide. Circumstances that increase the rate of depression are probably more directly tied to suicide as causal factors. Factors that correlation with those rate increases will show the same positive or negative correlation as the causal factors, but really have nothing (narrowly) to do with it.

[Dan_S]

Probably and also interesting...unless, I guess, it's just that bridge jumpers usually hesitate for a bit, then choose life...unless it's windy.

I think there’s a lot going on that we can’t explain, without being looked on as...kooky..

I mean, anyone that’s spent some time off-grid probably knows what I’m talking about, the sense that you’re not alone in the forest, etc. It’s...interesting.


Here’s an interesting case as well - eerily close to home. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_Brook_murders

[Dan_S]

I would guess the wind thing is correlation, not causation.

Areas with more wind are also likely to have more cloud cover and less solar energy/less light. We know that less daylight/less solar energy can be directly related to higher incidence of depression (e.g., SADS). Depression is certainly strongly causally linked with suicide. Circumstances that increase the rate of depression are probably more directly tied to suicide as causal factors. Factors that correlation with those rate increases will show the same positive or negative correlation as the causal factors, but really have nothing (narrowly) to do with it.

Alright, Wyoming. Very sunny. High suicide rate. The airbase there in Cheyenne I’ve been told, has a pretty high suicide rates as well.

Shrug, I dunno, but...it doesn’t fit.

[Maple Syrup Actual]

I think there’s a lot going on that we can’t explain, without being looked on as...kooky..

I mean, anyone that’s spent some time off-grid probably knows what I’m talking about, the sense that you’re not alone in the forest, etc. It’s...interesting.


Here’s an interesting case as well - eerily close to home. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_Brook_murders

I read you...

You know, people always want to separate humans from the natural world and always want to look for rational explanations for behaviour, but personally I don't expect rationality out of anything made of meat. One of our rabbits loves to lie in front of this vent on the kitchen floor, we assume because it gently ruffles her fur. What does she get out of the fur-ruffling? Nothing, she just likes the way it feels. She's happier when she can do that and the fact that there is no clear rational benefit doesn't really matter; we can't explain what consciousness is so why would we expect to have the ability to explain what "feels good" really means? Or why the gentle movement of a rabbit's fur might please the rabbit? And why would humans be different? Could long periods of strong winds make people feel a particular way? Could looking into dark and turbulent water take your mind places we can't rationally explain?

I don't think it's an intrinsically kooky concept, that's for sure. Or if it is, we have to also accept that humans are intrinsically somewhat kooky, so the internal logic may be sound even if trying to put it on paper makes it seem silly. Organic systems are complex and looking for simple explanations for the outputs is often very difficult. Narrowing everything down to "but can we test for it" does give you falsifiable data...but it also limits what you can know, just to what you can design an experiment around.

I often think that large scale psychological effects might be difficult to test, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. In some cases they might exist and even be things we could test but they're so built in to our underlying assumptions about reality that it might not be occurring to anyone to try to validate them...I think there are a lot of aspects of consciousness to which this applies. The rabbit-vent thing I was talking about is sort of an example: to feel nice. What is that? Or take another example: music. Why do we like it? The answers people give are often things like "because of the varying but familiar sounds, with a predicatable beat" but that just kicks the can down the road: why do we like a predictable beat? I don't think anybody knows why.

Anyway I don't discount the idea that wind potentially could have a particular effect if you looked on a large enough scale, or that the motif of the river might resonate in people in a way we can't necessarily explain.

[blues]

Anyway I don't discount the idea that wind potentially could have a particular effect if you looked on a large enough scale, or that the motif of the river might resonate in people in a way we can't necessarily explain.

And don't forget Niagra Falls...


https://youtu.be/JuMpcSTlB70

[NH Shooter]

Things we intuitively know to be true but cannot articulate.

[SeriousStudent]

...... My wife just said that the presence of a deep, dark river is actually a known factor in homicidal behavior. She told me that an instructor taught this, in a class she attended. (My wife worked 21 years as a death scene investigator for the Harris County, Texas M.E.)

Were any of those years between 1981 and 1983? If so, I am willing to bet her and I met in her professional capacity.

[OlongJohnson]

I mean, anyone that’s spent some time off-grid probably knows what I’m talking about, the sense that you’re not alone in the forest, etc. It’s...interesting.

This is one of the most epic threads I've seen anywhere on the web. People who get out into the woods a lot...

https://thumpertalk.com/forums/topic/847470-weirdcreepyfunny-things-youve-foundseen-on-the-trail/

[Totem Polar]

Or take another example: music. Why do we like it? The answers people give are often things like "because of the varying but familiar sounds, with a predicatable beat" but that just kicks the can down the road: why do we like a predictable beat? I don't think anybody knows why.

Anyway I don't discount the idea that wind potentially could have a particular effect if you looked on a large enough scale, or that the motif of the river might resonate in people in a way we can't necessarily explain.

On music: we do have some ideas on why people tend to uniformly like certain kinds of popular music. We like duple meter (typical 4/4 time) because we are bi-lateral, binocular, bi-symmetrical creatures that learn 4/4 time walking across the carpet between mom and dad, before memory. We like that 4/4 beat done at 120BPM, because it works with our biology; eg. walking pace/heart rate or while dancing, and it makes people want to shake their booty, then they sweat and get thirsty, then they buy all the overpriced drinks from the venues owned by vertically integrated liquor companies (as well, there is sone tie-in with 60bpm being a base for shamanic drumming, which in turn has been theoretically linked to the Schumann resonance of the earth, blah, blah, above my pay grade, etc). The interval of a minor third (sol-mi) is found in the folkloric and, especially, children's songs of every world culture, and we tend to identify major thirds as "happy" (in alignment with nature/dividing a vibrating string into 5 parts, 4 times the original vibration) and minor thirds as "sad" (dissonant/not an even division/ 6 parts at 5 times the original). At any rate, key centers and different color tones added to chords (eg. Maj or minor 7th) have each been codified and cataloged by the emotional valence they impart. So we do have some working theories on musical preferences.

The river thing? My wife said ‘river spirits’ when I read this thread to her. I dunno. I do know a bunch of songs where someone shoots/stabs/drowns their lover on the banks of a river, so it’s most def a thing in history.

I’ve long postulated that any normal human being who has been in the wilderness has had the experience of looking at a vast night sky, and thinking "whoa... who are we in this vastness, where do we come from, where are we going, and why are we here..." and other such spiritual triggerings—while people who only know light polluted big cities missthe trigger and behave accordingly.

Or not. Maybe I’m full of shit on that, but there’s some historical evidence to back the theory up.

[rob_s]

Something else that never gets mentioned... who is getting murdered?

The Baltimore paper used to publish a running list of names of murdered people. I started looking them up on the clerk of courts website and I was hard pressed to find anyone that didn’t already have a record, most rather extensive. My takeaway was that while they may have a big murder rate, my middle-class brother and sister in-law, and my young niece, who live there are actually quite safe.

[Darth_Uno]

This is one of the most epic threads I've seen anywhere on the web. People who get out into the woods a lot...

https://thumpertalk.com/forums/topic/847470-weirdcreepyfunny-things-youve-foundseen-on-the-trail/

Well that ate up most of my night. There’s some weird people in this world.

[Darth_Uno]

Something else that never gets mentioned... who is getting murdered?

The Baltimore paper used to publish a running list of names of murdered people. I started looking them up on the clerk of courts website and I was hard pressed to find anyone that didn’t already have a record, most rather extensive. My takeaway was that while they may have a big murder rate, my middle-class brother and sister in-law, and my young niece, who live there are actually quite safe.

Yup. If you eliminate gang violence (of all races) America has a violent crime rate about on par with the supposedly more civilized Western Europe. I’d link to a very interesting article I read, but I can’t seem to find it. Of course you can’t pretend gang violence doesn’t exist, but stupid attracts stupid - so as long as you’re not living a felonious lifestyle your chances of being randomly murdered in the city or country are pretty low.

[Rex G]

Were any of those years between 1981 and 1983? If so, I am willing to bet her and I met in her professional capacity.

I believe she was still attending university at that time. IIRC, she was at the Harris County M.E. From April 1994 to May 2015, and tended to stay on night shift.

[RoyGBiv]

I'd like to see an analysis/ranking done based on the number of violent crimes that happen outside of the "bad parts of town".

If I avoid the South Side and other known-bad parts of Chicago, for example, what's the probability of becoming the victim of a violent crime in the "safer" parts of the city?

IMO, that would be a more useful measure of whether I care to visit a place.

[Dog Guy]

Yup. If you eliminate gang violence (of all races) America has a violent crime rate about on par with the supposedly more civilized Western Europe. I’d link to a very interesting article I read, but I can’t seem to find it. Of course you can’t pretend gang violence doesn’t exist, but stupid attracts stupid - so as long as you’re not living a felonious lifestyle your chances of being randomly murdered in the city or country are pretty low.

I don't remember who, maybe Wall Street Journal, published a look at the five "most violent" cities in America about five years ago. The stat that jumped out at me was that 95% of the murder victims had a criminal record. I don't recall that there was a breakdown of what "criminal record" meant but it was pretty telling that crooks killing crooks was the main driver of the numbers.

[Dog Guy]

I'd like to see an analysis/ranking done based on the number of violent crimes that happen outside of the "bad parts of town".

If I avoid the South Side and other known-bad parts of Chicago, for example, what's the probability of becoming the victim of a violent crime in the "safer" parts of the city?

IMO, that would be a more useful measure of whether I care to visit a place.

OK, I gotta start a file of links to interesting studies/reports/factoids because I can never find them later. There was one called something like "The Problem is Too Many Democrats" in response to a "too many guns" rant. It looked at shootings down to the precinct level instead of by city or county or whatever, and correlated that to how blue or red an area voted. The correlation between precincts voting deeply blue and people shooting each other a lot was striking. I don't know how well the authors controlled for other factors but once again, pretty interesting.

[Yung]

Given what Mr. Givens has said about violent crime and modern medicine, I'd like to see something similar with cities ranked by aggravated assaults.

[Maple Syrup Actual]

On music: we do have some ideas on why people tend to uniformly like certain kinds of popular music. We like duple meter (typical 4/4 time) because we are bi-lateral, binocular, bi-symmetrical creatures that learn 4/4 time walking across the carpet between mom and dad, before memory. We like that 4/4 beat done at 120BPM, because it works with our biology; eg. walking pace/heart rate or while dancing, and it makes people want to shake their booty, then they sweat and get thirsty, then they buy all the overpriced drinks from the venues owned by vertically integrated liquor companies (as well, there is sone tie-in with 60bpm being a base for shamanic drumming, which in turn has been theoretically linked to the Schumann resonance of the earth, blah, blah, above my pay grade, etc). The interval of a minor third (sol-mi) is found in the folkloric and, especially, children's songs of every world culture, and we tend to identify major thirds as "happy" (in alignment with nature/dividing a vibrating string into 5 parts, 4 times the original vibration) and minor thirds as "sad" (dissonant/not an even division/ 6 parts at 5 times the original). At any rate, key centers and different color tones added to chords (eg. Maj or minor 7th) have each been codified and cataloged by the emotional valence they impart. So we do have some working theories on musical preferences.


To my way of thinking, though, these are all just hinting at a deeper question: when 4/4 time around 120bpm works for us because it feels right with our biology...why do we have that preference, the preference for familiarity or for similarity in sound? That's what I was (poorly) trying to describe with the rabbit. Why would we not be more pleased by something that feels really different than the natural rhythms that we might recognize from our own bodies? Why familiarity instead of novelty? Why the ruffling fur instead of the stillness? Or maybe ultimately the question I'm asking here is "what is pleasure?" These are the deeper questions that personally I think are harder to answer - although presumably there is an evolutionary tie-in in which an advantage is being conferred on organisms that are responding in a particular way, while still maximizing energy efficiency. But I think this becomes very murky and conjectural, and this is exactly why I am not bothered when a murky, conjectural concept like "the presence of a deep, dark river correlates with a higher murder rate" surfaces...it seems possible to me that some non-rational connection exists between the subjective minds of the animals around the river and their environment which might have some kind of fluke evolutionary advantage, or even just a disadvantage too subtle to have been pressured out.

There's a tendency to want to reduce that down to something which can be calculated out with data we already have; I think that's natural, and probably the core of our ability to understand anything is rooted in the desire to compare new things to familiar things.

But there is also this pitfall: if you are working from an incomplete data set, and you always are, you may well be reducing a novel phenomenon down to the wrong factors. I'm speaking about this too generally, maybe: let's imagine the river-murder hypothesis.

The tendency will be to say, exactly as one of our dimmer bulbs postulated, "maybe they're just seeing a good place to dump a body".

But maybe there is a much more complex psychological effect at work, and we don't have the tools to work that out.

I would equate it to pre-modern humans watching the sun: maybe it climbs out of bed and walks through the skies above the fixed and unmoving surface on which everything exists, and a new one is born each day and expires at night. If you want to understand it in the terms available to pre-astronomy people, that's what it's going to get reduced down to.

So I think there is a ton of value to examining the world in terms of currently available data, obviously, but I think there's also a tendency to assume that any novel phenomenon will fit into an existing structure of things we already understand. Frequently it does, I guess. I don't know why this became a gigantic long-winded philosophical sidebar for me but I guess it's all worth it because I get to conclude with this statement: I am just saying that not everything in the world is best represented by conveniently dumping a body in the river.

[Maple Syrup Actual]

Something else that never gets mentioned... who is getting murdered?

The Baltimore paper used to publish a running list of names of murdered people. I started looking them up on the clerk of courts website and I was hard pressed to find anyone that didn’t already have a record, most rather extensive. My takeaway was that while they may have a big murder rate, my middle-class brother and sister in-law, and my young niece, who live there are actually quite safe.

If I had to guess, I would say that if you subtracted "Men with criminal records and the women they've knocked up" from the victim numbers, murder would be an absolutely freak occurrence almost everywhere in the west.

Although I guess back when I was studying forensics one of my instructors talked about what they called "homo-cides" which were their own category of vindictive revenge murders between gay men, usually without a significant criminal history. But even then I doubt you'd see enough to make a real blip on the radar.

[AKDoug]

Something else that never gets mentioned... who is getting murdered?

The Baltimore paper used to publish a running list of names of murdered people. I started looking them up on the clerk of courts website and I was hard pressed to find anyone that didn’t already have a record, most rather extensive. My takeaway was that while they may have a big murder rate, my middle-class brother and sister in-law, and my young niece, who live there are actually quite safe.

Back in the early days of email there was a junk email circulating calling it the "good riddance factor"..

Oddly enough, the only two people I know that were murdered were killed at random by complete strangers with mental issues. Otherwise I pay attention who gets killed in the closest major city and the vast majority of them are related to drugs, association with known drug people, gang related activity, and generally being an asshole.

You are pretty safe if you make good decisions about who you associate with and living a life free of illegal drugs and excessive alcohol.

[0ddl0t]

Things we intuitively know to be true but cannot articulate.
Are statistics off limits?



Most Murderous Cities:

1. St. Louis 60.9/100k
2. Baltimore 51/100k
3. Detroit 38.9/100k
4. New Orleans 37.1/100k
5. Baton Rouge 35.1/100k

US average: 5.3/100k



Large Cities with highest percentage of Blacks:

1) Detroit, MI 82.7%
2) Jackson, MS 79.4%
3) Birmingham, AL 73.4%
4) Baltimore, MD 63.7%
5) Memphis, TN 63.3
6) New Orleans, LA 60.2%
7) Baton Rouge, LA 58.5%
8) Augusta, GA 54.7%
9) Shreveport, LA 54.7%
10) Montgomery, AL 54.5%
11) Atlanta, GA 54.0%
12) Cleveland, OH 53.3%
13) Newark, NJ 52.4%
14) Washington, DC 50.7%
15) Richmond, VA 50.6%
16) Mobile, AL 50.6%
17) St Louis, MO 49.2%
18) Cincinnati, OH 45.0%
19) Philadelphia, PA 43.4%
20) Norfolk, VA 43.1%

US Average: 13.4%

[Jhp147]

The last 10 or so years in my job included a lot of explaining of crime stats to the public and media. Every time stats came out, or whenever an article like this came up. I kept the FBI/DOJ page explaining that you cannot use crime stats to compare/rank cities bookmarked:
https://ucrdatatool.gov/ranking.cfm
The massive number of variables make that idea useless, but especially the media insists on doing it...because it gets clicks, which translate to ad dollars. And THAT is what is really important, $.
Citizens tried to use these stats as ways to "grade" both a city and the police effectiveness...other points cautioned against on the DOJ page. At best the stats can only be used to compare a city to itself over a long term.

[NickA]

On music: we do have some ideas on why people tend to uniformly like certain kinds of popular music. We like duple meter (typical 4/4 time) because we are bi-lateral, binocular, bi-symmetrical creatures that learn 4/4 time walking across the carpet between mom and dad, before memory. We like that 4/4 beat done at 120BPM, because it works with our biology; eg. walking pace/heart rate or while dancing, and it makes people want to shake their booty, then they sweat and get thirsty, then they buy all the overpriced drinks from the venues owned by vertically integrated liquor companies (as well, there is sone tie-in with 60bpm being a base for shamanic drumming, which in turn has been theoretically linked to the Schumann resonance of the earth, blah, blah, above my pay grade, etc). The interval of a minor third (sol-mi) is found in the folkloric and, especially, children's songs of every world culture, and we tend to identify major thirds as "happy" (in alignment with nature/dividing a vibrating string into 5 parts, 4 times the original vibration) and minor thirds as "sad" (dissonant/not an even division/ 6 parts at 5 times the original). At any rate, key centers and different color tones added to chords (eg. Maj or minor 7th) have each been codified and cataloged by the emotional valence they impart. So we do have some working theories on musical preferences.

The river thing? My wife said ‘river spirits’ when I read this thread to her. I dunno. I do know a bunch of songs where someone shoots/stabs/drowns their lover on the banks of a river, so it’s most def a thing in history.

I’ve long postulated that any normal human being who has been in the wilderness has had the experience of looking at a vast night sky, and thinking "whoa... who are we in this vastness, where do we come from, where are we going, and why are we here..." and other such spiritual triggerings—while people who only know light polluted big cities missthe trigger and behave accordingly.

Or not. Maybe I’m full of shit on that, but there’s some historical evidence to back the theory up.

I didn't understand a damned word of the first half of this post except for the part about bars. But I wish I did, so I gave it a like [emoji41]

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