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Houston, a very dangerous city…

… now has a very high-profile homicide.

Margaret Soltan, July 20, 2018 8:31PM
Posted in: guns

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3 Responses to “Houston, a very dangerous city…”

  1. Pete Copeland Says:

    Well there’s all kinds of danger, I suppose. Here in Houston, we have about a 1 in 20 chance of experiencing a hurricane every year. On the other hand the danger of getting frostbite is quite low.

    But when it comes to homicides, I’m not really sure that “very dangerous city” is appropriate. That is, if one is to be governed in one’s public discourse by data.

    Below is an sampling of the data on homicides in US cites published by the Dept of Justice in 2017. They listed data for 80 cites. I had to calculate the rate of homicide per 1000 people so I didn’t bother to work on the whole list. I decided to only calculate for cities with Major League Baseball teams (pick another filter if you don’t like that one) so the list below is for 27 cites (there are 30 MLB teams but two are in Chicago, two in NYC and one in Canada) followed by the rate of homicides per 1000 people in the year 2016.

    St. Louis 0.59
    Baltimore 0.51
    Detroit 0.45
    Cleveland 0.35
    Chicago 0.28
    Kansas City 0.27
    Atlanta 0.24
    Oakland 0.21
    Washington 0.21
    Milwaukee 0.21
    Pittsburgh 0.19
    Cincinnati 0.19
    Philadelphia 0.18
    Houston 0.13
    Miami 0.13
    Dallas/FW 0.11
    Phoenix 0.09
    Denver 0.09
    Tampa 0.08
    Minn/St Paul 0.08
    Boston 0.07
    San Francisco 0.07
    Los Angeles 0.07
    New York 0.04
    San Diego 0.04
    Seattle 0.03
    Anaheim 0.02

    So, Houston ranks 14th on this list of 27 cities with a homicide rate four times less than Baltimore and just about half of that of Washington.

    But data is not the only thing folks use to govern their discourse. There’s always emotion. Quicker and easier.

    source of data: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/251067.pdf

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    I wasn’t only referring to murder, Pete. Though Houston ranks fairly high for that too. I was talking about the whole crime/safety picture there:

    https://patch.com/texas/bellaire/houston-doesnt-fare-well-americas-most-dangerous-cities-list

  3. dmf Says:

    @WSJ
    Schools are buying “active shooter” insurance to avoid litigation and offset costs for counseling services, crisis management and added security after an attack.

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