Life Sentences Blog

The Milwaukee Police Department recently supplied the members of the Fire and Police Commission (including yours truly) with some quite interesting data on violent crime rates within the nation’s 50 poorest cites.  As one might expect, the very poorest cities on the list generally tend to have the worst rates of violent crime.  The correlation, however, is far from absolute.  Several cities on the list impressively over-perform or under-perform relative to their poverty rates.  To focus on this, I present below a much simplified version of the table prepared by the MPD, which is based on 2009 data.

	Poverty Rank	Violent Crime Rank
Detroit, Michigan	1	2
Cleveland, Ohio	2	7
Buffalo, New York	3	6
Milwaukee, Wisconsin	4	21
St. Louis, Missouri	5	1
Miami, Florida	6	14
Memphis, Tennessee	7	3
Cincinnati, Ohio	8	13
Philadelphia	9	11
Newark, New Jersey	10	24
Toledo, Ohio	11	18
New Orleans, Louisiana	12	29
Tuscon, Arizona	13	35
Dallas, Texas	14	28
Pittsburg, Pennsylvania	15	23
Fresno, California	16	38
Minneapolis, Minnesota	17	20
St. Paul, Minnesota	18	31
Columbus, Ohio	19	33
El Paso, Texas	20	49
Atlanta, Georgia	21	15
Stockton, California	22	9
Chicago, Illinois	23	n/a
Phoenix, Arizona	24	45
Baltimore, Maryland	25	5
Houston, Texas	26	17
Bakersfield, California	27	36
Indianapolis, Indiana	28	12
Santa Ana, California	29	47
Los Angeles, California	30	37
San Antonio, Texas	31	43
Tulsa, Oklahoma	32	19
Long Beach, California	33	34
Tampa, Florida	34	32
Sacramento, California	35	26
Denver, Colorado	36	42
Ft. Worth, Texas	37	41
Corpus Christi, Texas	38	27
New York, New York	39	44
Austin, Texas	40	46
Washington, D.C.	41	10
Oklahoma City	42	25
Louisville, Kentucky	43	39
Lexington, Kentucky	44	40
Nashville, Tennessee	45	16
Oakland, California	46	4
Boston, Massachusetts	47	22
Aurora, Colorado	48	48
Kansas City, Missouri	49	8
Albuqueque, New Mexico	50	30

So which cities do best and worst?

Here are the top ten over-performers, in terms of difference between the violent-crime rank and the poverty rank:

1.  El Paso (violent crime rank=49, poverty rate=20, difference=29)

2T.  Fresno (38-16=22)

2T.  Tuscon (35-13=22)

4.  Phoenix (45-24=21)

5.  Santa Ana, CA (47-29=18)

6T.  Milwaukee (21-4=17)

6T.  New Orleans (29-12=17)

8T.  Columbus (33-19=14)

8T.  Dallas (28-14=14)

8T.   Newark (24-10=14)

Here are the top (bottom?) ten under-performers:

1.  Oakland (poverty rank=46, violent-crime rank=4, difference=42)

2.  Kansas City, MO (49-8=41)

3.  Washington, DC (41-10=31)

4.  Nashville (45-16=29)

5.  Boston (47-22=27)

6.  Albuquerque (50-30=20)

7.  Baltimore (25-5=20)

8.  Indianapolis (28-12=16)

9T.  Tulsa (32-19=13)

9T.  Stockton, CA (22-9=13)

Obviously, some cities do quite a bit better than others in dealing with the tendency of poverty to generate violent crime.  Why is that?  Good (and bad) policing probably plays a role, but there are probably many other factors, too.

Here’s another way of thinking about the data.  Milwaukee and St. Louis have almost exactly the same poverty rate (27 percent), but St. Louis’s rate of violent crime is nearly twice as high (21 versus 11 per 1,000 residents).  Evidently, that 1982 World Series victory did little over the long run to improve St. Louis’s fortunes relative to Milwaukee’s.

Meanwhile, Nashville’s poverty rate is about one-third less than Milwaukee’s (27 versus 17 percent), but the two cities have the same rate of violent crime.  And Nashville’s crime rate is nearly double that of Louisville, even though Louisville’s poverty is slightly higher.

There are many interesting questions, not the least of which is what is the secret to El Paso’s success?  With a population that is basically the same as Milwaukee’s (619,000 there and 605,000 here), and a poverty rate not a lot lower (23 versus 27 percent), El Paso had less than half of Milwaukee’s number of violent crimes in 2009 (2,830 versus 6,584).  At least we’re not Baltimore (639,000, 21 percent, 9,664).

In a later post, I’ll compare this 2009 data with similar data from 2007.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 30th, 2011 at 2:56 am and is filed under Crime Data, Milwaukee. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.