Which U.S. Cities Are the Most Dangerous?

According to the latest data from the FBI, violent crime decreased across the board by 10.3 percent in the first half of  Robbery was down 13.6 percent, rape was down nearly 18 percent, and murder dropped by almost 23 percent. But serious crimes still happen, and in certain cities, they happen a lot more than in others.

In this in-depth look at violent crime in U.S. cities and states, for a city to be considered dangerous, it has to meet two prerequisites. It has to have a high rate of violent crime — murder, aggravated assault, rape, and robbery, as opposed to property crime — and it has to have a population over 10,000 people. Let’s dive right in and find out which are the most dangerous places in the U.S. today.

The Most Dangerous Cities in the U.S.

Judging from the stats above, New York City looks like the most violent city in the U.S. But it isn’t. New York City is relatively safe compared to 25 smaller cities with much more violent crime per capita. The most violent city, Anniston, is a town of 22,000 in northeastern Alabama. Anniston has a whopping 3,434 violent crimes per capita, or about one violent crime for every seven people.

Another Alabama town, Bessemer, ranks No. 2, and three others in the state are among the top 25, making Alabama one of the most dangerous states as well. But, as we can see, violent crime is a problem in large cities, too. St. Louis, Detroit, Memphis, Kansas City, and Baltimore, for example, are all on the list.

Murder

During the reporting period, just over 17,000 people became victims of murder and intentional manslaughter in the United States, making murder one of the few violent crimes that’s actually rising amid the general decline of violent crime in the country. The number of murders in the U.S. has gone up by more than 22% in a three-year period and currently stands at levels last seen more than a decade ago.

Chicago had the most murders among all cities with 653, nearly double the second-highest city, Baltimore.

As with the overall number of violent crimes, this list largely tracks with population size, though St. Louis, with a population of about 310,000, comes in at No. 8. Chicago had nearly as many murders as Baltimore and Philadelphia combined.

After adjusting for population differences, though, the city with the highest murder rate does not appear among the top 10 when it comes to total volume of murders.

East St. Louis, No. 4 on our violent-crime rate list, tops the list of cities by murder rate, with a rate that’s far higher than the next couple of cities on the list, Chester, Pennsylvania, and Vinita Park, Missouri. Several major cities are on this list, including St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit and New Orleans.

Rape

An estimated 135,755 rapes took place in the U.S. within the one-year reporting period, though rape is a crime that’s notoriously  and tragically misunderstood. Even in an era where there are fruitful conversations taking place about sexual consent, the states don’t agree on what constitutes rape, with some jurisdictions seeming to use a definition that would exclude things like date rape.

More rapes were reported in Los Angeles than any other city, though New York City was close.

While the top of this list generally falls in line with population size, there are some interesting entries here. Columbus and Austin both have less than 1 million residents, though they are Nos. 9 and 10, respectively. Notably, both cities are home to two of the 10 largest public college campuses in the country, Ohio State University and the University of Texas. An estimated 1 in 10 college students will experience rape or sexual

After accounting for population differences, our list changes dramatically. In fact, only three of the cities among the top 25 have populations over 1 million.

Cadillac, a city of just over 10,000 in northwestern Michigan has the nation’s highest population-adjusted rape rate, posting a rate that’s about one-third higher than the next-highest, another Michigan city, Alpena. Texas and Michigan both have five cities in the top 25, while Colorado, South Carolina and Utah each have two. Salt Lake City, at No. 25, is the largest one on the list, with a population just shy of 2 million.

Robbery

The second-most common violent crime, robbery, is often confused with property crimes like burglary or larceny, but while precise definitions can vary by jurisdiction, robbery is marked by one key difference — violence or the threat of force.

More than 300,000 robberies took place in the U.S. in the year we gathered data from, with large cities generally accounting for large numbers of such incidents.

New York had by far the most robberies reported, which makes sense if you accept that the archetypal crime in the city is a mugging, which is a form of robbery. A handful of smaller cities, Baltimore, Indianapolis and Memphis, leapfrogged some larger ones to rise to the top 10.

After accounting for differences in population, the city with the highest robbery rate is Baltimore.

Six New Jersey cities are in the top 25, the most of any state, while Florida has three and California, Georgia, Ohio and Pennsylvania have two each. No city in the top 25 has a total population exceeding 750,000.

Aggravated Assault

By far the most common violent crime in the U.S., accounting for more than all the others combined, is aggravated assault. This is not the only type of assault crime, however, and what distinguishes aggravated assault from other forms, such as simple assault, is the use of a weapon or the infliction of serious bodily injury on the victim. More than 810,000 aggravated assaults were reported during the reporting period, which is an increase from the previous years but a 17% decline compared to data from the year 1998.

According to sheer volume, New York had far and away the highest number of aggravated assaults, and the remainder of the top 10 mostly includes heavily populated cities.

Texas is the only state with more than one city among the top 10, but New York’s nearly 30,000 aggravated assaults accounted for more than Houston and San Antonio combined.

Anniston, Alabama, which had the highest overall violent crime rate, also tops this list, along with four other Alabama cities. Michigan and Louisiana each have three, and two cities with the same name appear — Camden, one in New Jersey and the other in Arkansas — with nearly identical rates.

25 Most Dangerous U.S. Cities

So which cities are all-around the most dangerous? There’s one aspect we haven’t addressed here, and that’s how these cities rate relative to the overall rates of crime in the U.S. To figure out the 25 most dangerous American cities, we’ve also take into account national rates of murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault, calculating each city’s crime rate as a percentage of the corresponding U.S. rate and then averaging the four percentages together.

If you’ve read closely to this point, you probably could have guessed more than a few of these, but there are some interesting entries.

Our analysis finds the single most dangerous American city is East St. Louis, Illinois, just on the other side of the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri, which is No. 5 on our list. All 25 have appeared on at least one of the lists of the population-adjusted crime rates, and most have appeared multiple times.

Detroit is the largest city in the top 25, and you may be wondering how safe America’s largest cities are. Among the 35 or so cities on our list with populations that exceed 500,000, Baltimore is by far the most dangerous, according to the city’s violent crime rates as a percentage of corresponding rates for the entire U.S.

Only three of the 30+ largest U.S. cities have crime rates that average out to less than 100% of the respective crime rates for the nation as a whole, and most of them have rates in excess of 200% of the national rates.

Conclusion

What we haven’t broached here is the why of city violence. To be sure, total population plays a role, though when compared to overall U.S. crime rates, the largest city in the country, New York City, has one of the lowest incidents of crime relative to the nation.

It’s a fact that FBI data indicates violent crime is a bigger problem in Baltimore than in any other major city. But Baltimore is not unique in having high rates of crime, as most of the largest American cities have similarly high rates of crime. Those communities, places like Albuquerque and Indianapolis and Milwaukee and Phoenix, are rarely ever held up as examples of failing cities by politicians who want to pick fights.

We’re not suggesting we have the answers for how to improve the lives of people in Baltimore and make them less likely to be victimized by violence. But we do know that improvements are possible, as violent crime (and crime in general) is becoming less common across the United States. A good place to start would be remembering that “real America” is urban America — the 9,000-plus cities we examined accounted for nearly two-thirds of the entire U.S. population.

About This Story

All the crime data we used came from the FBI’s 2017 Crime in the United States  which was published in 2018. We used the information on offenses known to law enforcement sorted by city.

The FBI also sorts data by metropolitan statistical areas, but we wanted to use the most granular data possible, so we opted for cities proper. There are a few limitations to this data, most notably that the state of North Carolina does not conform to the FBI’s definition of rape, so that information was not available for cities in that state.

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