The raw crime count figure cited in the viral post is drawn from official FBI Uniform Crime Reporting data and is numerically accurate. However, presenting raw crime counts from cities of vastly different population sizes as a meaningful comparison is statistically invalid. Per-capita adjusted, the city depicted as having the "highest crime" ranks 34th nationally. The post also conflates violent crime and property crime, two meaningfully different categories with different public safety implications.
The Claim
A widely shared social media post listed five American cities by total annual crime count, presenting the ranking as evidence that certain cities are dangerous due to specific policy choices. The post included a large American city at the top with a raw crime count of approximately 87,000 incidents annually.
Why Raw Counts Are Misleading
Comparing raw crime totals across cities of different sizes is like comparing the total number of car accidents in Los Angeles to the total in a town of 10,000 people and concluding that Los Angeles has an "accident problem." Of course larger cities record more total crimes — they have more people, more interactions, more opportunity for both crime and reporting.
The standard measure for meaningful crime comparison is crimes per 100,000 residents, which normalizes for population size. This is the figure used by the FBI itself in its annual Crime in the United States report, by criminologists, and by law enforcement agencies when making policy comparisons.
How the Rankings Change
When the cities in the viral post are ranked by violent crime rate per 100,000 residents — the appropriate comparison — the city listed first in the viral post drops from #1 to #34 nationally. Three of the five cities listed fall out of the top 20. Two smaller cities not mentioned in the post rank significantly higher on a per-capita basis.
The Conflation of Crime Categories
The viral post used a total crime figure that combines FBI Part I offenses across two distinct categories: violent crimes (murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault) and property crimes (burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, arson). These categories have fundamentally different public safety implications, are driven by different social and economic factors, and are addressed through different policy interventions.
A city with a high property crime rate and a low violent crime rate presents a very different public safety environment than the reverse — yet the viral post's combined figure obscures this distinction entirely.
Bottom Line
The raw numbers are real. But using raw counts without per-capita adjustment to compare cities of different sizes, and combining distinct crime categories into a single figure, produces a ranking that does not reflect the lived public safety experience in those cities. When proper statistical methods are applied, the ranking in the viral post is almost entirely inverted. This is misleading, not false — because the underlying data exists, but the framing creates a false impression.
Primary Sources
- FBI. Crime in the United States: Uniform Crime Reports. FBI.gov.
- FBI. UCR Data Tool: Offenses Known to Law Enforcement. FBI.gov.
- Pew Research Center. What the data says about crime in the U.S. PewResearch.org.
- Bureau of Justice Statistics. Criminal Victimization, 2022. BJS.gov.