Quote:
Originally Posted by brightmidnight
St. Louis gets a bad rap crime statistic-wise because the city limits are legally restricted to a small land area size - while other cities just expand and take in more suburban areas, the city of St. Louis legally cannot. Since FBI crime statistics are taken by total number of crimes divided by city area size, St. Louis comes out higher than it accurately should.
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Crime rate statistics are NOT given on a per land area basis. They are given on a per inhabitant basis.
http://www.cityrating.com/crime-stat...l#.UXqcMHdc2f0
From the Wikipedia entry: (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_statistics)
"Because crime is a social issue, comparisons of crime between places or years are normally performed on some sort of population basis."
It can be argued that larger cities have lower crime rates because their populations include suburbanites who commit less crimes. But it is not true that their crime rates are smaller solely because their land area are larger.
For a more detailed discussion of crime rates and their limitations, see this document:
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr...eir-proper-use