DC Crime Stats Have Improved

According to FBI data, crime in DC went down from 20008 to 2009, sometimes by fairly large percentages. Here is a graph I made using their statistics. I hope that they aren’t hiding something.

There was a time when DC had the reputation of being the nation’s ‘murder capital.’ How about today?

Here’s a table I made using the FBI data., showing where DC falls among the top 20 most murder-prone cities in the US. Surprise: if the data is correct, we are no longer even in the top 10!

Washington, DC is now number 14.  Apparently, the three cities where a citizen is now most likely to get murdered are New Orleans, Richmond  (California, not Virginia), and Saint Louis.  According to this data, about 2.4 people in DC were murdered for every 10,000 people. Our neighbor, Baltimore, was considerably more dangerous than DC, wih a rate of 3.7 murders per 10,000 people.

Let’s compare that with 2008. Here is the table I made:

As you can see, Washington was much closer to the top murder rate in 2008 – we were number 7, with a murder rate of 3.1 per 10,000. (As you can obviously tell, being number 1 is NOT a good thing here!)

Notice something else. Our very largest cities, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, don’t appear anywhere in the top 20 cities. Did I forget them? No. Chicago was #28 in 2009, with a rate of 1.6 murders per ten thousand inhabitants. Los Angeles was #72 with 0.8 murders per 10,000, and New York City was #82 with a murder rate of 0.6 per ten thousand.