I would like to disclose that I will approach this introduction from the perspective of a typical American who did not grow up in the city. From what I understand, this does include a lot of people who grew up in the suburbs as well. If that is you, you may likely recall hearing older family members talk about the city, how dangerous it was. Maybe you heard a friend or older sibling call Chicago “Chiraq”, or a concerned aunt lecture you when you revealed you were accepted into a college in Chicago. The idea that cities, especially Chicago, are exceptionally dangerous is a pervasive narrative that I believe prompts further investigation.
Rather than looking at Chicago statistics specifically, as Kris Shiflet will be doing in a seperate article on this issue, I’d rather turn our attention to comparing Chicago to an area often touted as safe — the countryside. I’ve heard far too many elders cling to the idea that people are much safer as far away from a city as possible. So, what do the statistics say? According to FBI statistics in the year 2024, the five states with the highest violent crime rates were Alaska, New Mexico, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana, in order of highest to lowest. For those less familiar with American geography, these are some of the least densely populated states in the country, with Tennessee being the most dense at 20th place according to the US Census Bureau (2010). The metropolitan areas within these states, save for Louisiana, are also not particularly large, furthering this notion.
The University of Michigan provides a county-by-county breakdown courtesy of ICPSR, which shows a bit more nuance. Analyzing the top ten counties by violent crime rate, you will find that about half of the counties lie in the middle of nowhere, while the other half are part of cities, but not the ones you’d anticipate. You will not find Cook County, any of New York’s boroughs, or any county from the West Coast. Instead, we find St. Louis City, Baltimore City, and Crittenden County, Arkansas, home of West Memphis. This paints a more complex picture of the crime rate, where we don’t see the divide of city versus country that many paint.
While there are many theories out there, I find the correlation between poverty and crime to be rather reliable. A quick search of the term “crime and poverty” shows studies from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (Connections Among Poverty, Incarceration, and Inequality), the National Institute of Health (Urban Poverty and Neighborhood Effects on Crime: Incorporating Spatial and Network Perspectives), Oxford (Poverty and Crime), and many others all coming to the same conclusion: crime tends to originate from areas with higher rates of poverty. It’s not a city or a country issue, it’s an issue of who has money and who doesn’t. More often than not, that does tend to be more rural areas, but that hardly excludes cities from this effect.
To go further, the distrust of cities like Chicago and New York City doesn’t come from just plain fear-mongering. Both these cities faced notably high crime rates in the 20th century, but have since dropped dramatically to pretty average rates (see Shiflet’s article). What changed between then and now has been decades of social policies and people-first funding that have not only reduced crime, but changed the lives of neighborhoods and populations that were otherwise disservice. In a future issue, I plan to delve deeper into this phenomenon of newly-found safety and analyze the politics that made it happen. But for now, the next time you hear someone spread fear about our city, take a moment to think about it, and remember that when in doubt, you can always dig deeper to find the truth.