For the fifth year in a row Detroit tops the Forbes list of the Most Dangerous City.

Crushing financial woes that drove Detroit into the biggest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.

 The violent crime rate in the Motor City actually declined last year, but make no mistake: Detroit is still a very dangerous place. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s crime database reports Detroit had 386 murders last year, down from 344 in 2011 but essentially unchanged from 2000 – when the city had 200,000 more residents.
The steady outflow of residents has driven Detroit’s murder rate up to 54.6 per 100,000, more than 10 times the national average and the highest in the country among large cities. Equally troubled Stockton, Calif., fifth on this year’s Most Dangerous list, has less than half the murder rate of Detroit.
Detroit’s problems are typical of many of the cities on this year’s list, “It’s a story about segregation, integration and gentrification,” said John Roman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and lecturer in criminology at the University of Pennsylvania.

The violent crime rate for the Detroit MSA is 574 per 100,000 population, 48% higher than the national average — and virtually all attributable to the area’s much more dangerous urban core.
 Only a handful of murders in the Detroit MSA were reported outside of Detroit itself. The St. Louis MSA also has a crime rate well above national averages, but more than half the murders occurred in St. Louis proper Crime, Roman said, is about “dense clusters of low-skilled young men.”

More effective policing and more foreign immigrants appear to help drive down crime rates,
let us all hope the crimes keep going down in Detroit.

                                    Detroit 1950                                         Detroit  2013

Source:  http://www.forbes.com/                                         S