The 50 Most Dangerous Cities in the World

Definitely. One's chance of personally being murdered are infinitesimal, almost regardless where you are.

But when you live in a violent city (as I did, in Detroit, for three years of law school), your chances of being touched indirectly by homicide are quite high.

My first year there, a couple of guys (who were trying rob some other criminals) were shot to death in the house two doors down. Later, after I moved closer to the university campus, a grad student couple and their kid were murdered by a stranger in their apartment, just a block from where I was living.

And those were just the ultimately lethal incidents that happened around me. Murder isn't the only risk of living in a high-crime environment. Several people I knew personally were attacked, raped, robbed, burglarized, etc.

Most people have at least 100 friends and acquaintances. If you and your friends and acquaintances live in a place like Detroit, across ten or twenty years, the cumulative chance of one of you getting murdered starts to become pretty significant.

If you extend that 100 people to just their families and close friends, that raises the risk by about another order of magnitude. You may never have met your hairdresser's mom, or your co-worker's brother-in-law, but if they are murdered, that will have an indirect impact on you.

Oh, shit. I should just shut up.

 

Anchorage?

 

Nope.




Detroit is the only major US city where you could look due south and see Canada.

 

Um, yeah, but that only applies to the part of Detroit and suburbs east of Livernois, approximately. I believe you live further west, so a line drawn straight south from your house would completely miss Canada.

 

yeah, I was kinda pulling your leg... but then again, if you had Sarah Palin eyes....

 

From my house, yes, but I wrote this from work. I'm at WSU.

 

Ah. As you may know from my post earlier in this thread, I'm an alum of Wayne's law school.
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Hmmm ... no Google Street View in Iran.

 

Detroit, and by extension, Southern Ontario, are at the same latitude as Corsica, Rome and the norther border of California.

Also, Singapore isn't anywhere near the list of dangerous cities. Milquetoast might be more dangerous.

 

I loved Belize but never felt comfortable in Belize City....xoxoxoo

 

Personally I would struggle to understand what measure puts Detroit as more dangerous than Mogadishu, Damascus or Fallujah (for example)

 

Just see the first sentence of the material you quoted. The measure is the 2011 murder rate.

That is one measure, and though it's hardly comprehensive, it still imparts a lot of information.

Most of those other cities you mention are dangerous because of war or anarchy, not murder as such. Some of them were peaceful in 2011. But any reasonably complete set of worldwide comparison numbers is going to be a few years out of date.

Mogadishu, as I said before, doesn't even have any crime statistics, because Somalia has no regular government to compile them.

I really regret starting this thread. I apologize to everyone. Can it be deleted now?

 

No.

It is something that needs to be discussed, and figured out. Why are some places safe, when others are not?

 

Nice that good ol' Detroit has something to boast about besides well, you know. Interesting that it involves Canada tho.
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Seriously?
Can no one say the words? The way these people are dying and the circumstances of their lives that put them in the line of fire?
Seems pretty straightforward to me, but I am not getting involved in a rant.

 

Ok, but which of those 4 places would you rather live?

Detroit might be a rough city. Mogadishu has been in a state of more or less civil war for over a decade and is still largely controlled by warlords

 

Maybe I forgot to say this: I did live in the city of Detroit for three years, at a time when its crime rate was worse than it is today.

Also, I'm pretty sure I wrote the words hardly comprehensive somewhere above. The 2011 murder rate is just one way to look at this problem.

For example, the 2013 murder rate (which is not currently available) would yield a different ranking. The number of gunshots per capita in each city (if that were somehow known) would yield still another ranking. So would the rate of colon cancer, or syphilis, or traffic accidents.

Every one of those rankings would be interesting, but none of them would yield a 100% complete picture.

No single measure could ever capture the full range of all the different realities that exist.

And Mogadishu, as I keep saying, and keep saying, and keep saying, and keep saying, is a conspicuous special case that exists outside the world of government statistics.

Mogadishu would be unranked on almost any list based on statistics, unless you care to go there and count things up for yourself.

 

(Mostly) gun free Australia says hi!

 

so does gun free UAE. One of the safest places ive visited ( and lived in) in my many travels. Even safer than Australia. Gun crime is unheard of there

 

There must be a balancing factor... hmmm I heard that you can't nude sunbath in the UAE??