Statistics
St Louis Violence - Statistics may be misleading
According to FBI 2013 statistics St Louis (318K inhabitants) is the 3rd most violent city in US (over 250K inhabitants). But when you consider the whole St Louis Metro area (2.7M inhabitants) then according to the same FBI the St Louis drops to the 38th position in 131 Metro Areas with over 500K inhabitants. And this last number does not even count Chicago, NY, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis and Baton Rouge because the lack of some statistic numbers from those cities for the FBI to calculate their Violence Index. So maybe St. Louis Metro would be even lower than 38 position if those exception cities had their violent statistic numbers accounted.
Here is the reason why St. Louis City has a such distorted violence crime index compared to the whole St Louis Metro Area: The City of St Louis has a very small area (66.2 sq mi) compared to the St Louis Metro Area (8,458 sq mi). And has a very small population (318K) compared to the St. Louis Metro area (2.7M). On other major metropolitan areas the core city has normally a large area and population even when they are compared to their metro areas: E.g. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, etc. The City of St Louis is a small area but packed with a lot of business. And most of the people that work in St Louis City live in the St Louis Metro area. So the St Louis City has a little number of inhabitants. Because St. Louis has a very small area, a very small population, holds a lot of business activity, and also holds a dangerous neighborhood outside of the downtown, then its violent crime rate is very distorted, very high. That is the reason that the violence looks so bad in St Louis City, but when you look from a big perspective, from a metropolitan area perspective, you can really see that St Louis is not that violent. In fact you will see how many other cities are more violent then St. Louis. So please pay attention to what number you see when talking about violence in St Louis. The metro area violence index is much more relevant then the St Louis City violence index.
Here are the numbers calculated from from FBI crime numbers in 2012:
Metro Area Violence Index
City Violence Index