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FBI's crime rates by US city spreadsheet

Posted by simonov on 7 May 2007

The FBI makes available a nifty spreadsheet listing 2005 crime rates from hundreds of US cities. Since it’s already a spreadsheet, you can play with the numbers any way you want.

I used to the spreadsheet to determine the ten US cities with populations above 200,000 with the highest homicide rates (murder/manslaughter per 100,000 people):

Washington DC, the poster boy for the futility of gun control, is number five. Not the worst in the entire US, but certainly nothing to be proud of. DC’s homicide rate is, for example, more than two and a half times that of Los Angeles, at 12.63. Let’s examine why this is so.

Anyone looking for correlations in the numbers won’t find much, except that the cities with the highest homicide rates tend to have lower populations, which, statistically, weights the homicide rates in a somewhat deceptive manner.

For example, in DC’s defense, it only has a population of 550,521, so it takes a smaller number of drug deals gone bad to ratchet up its homicide rate compared to a bigger city like Philadelphia (which, BTW, is the only city with over one million people in the top ten and, if history is any guide, can count on even more gun violence in the wake of last week’s new gun control legislation).

Los Angeles (with ten day waits, one handgun a month, ammunition restrictions, no private party transfers, no “assault weapons,” no .50 BMGs, no CCWs, etc) experiences nine homicides a week, but with a huge population of 3,871,077 that translates to a relatively low homicide rate.

Download the spreadsheet and spend a lunch break or two fooling around with the numbers. Interesting stuff.

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