For some tasty reading, here are the murder rates per 100,000 people for all 300 or so metropolitan areas in the United States in 2001. Interesting reading; you can see how your area stacks up against othres, and you may be surprised. it's a PDF:
www.morganquitno.com/cit01rank.pdf
For example, Polyphobic, you're about right on about Denver's murder rate -- 7.9 according to these older figures, ranking #113 for murders among all metro areas -- right below New York City, which is at #112.
But you may be surprised at the cities that have higher murder rates: #89, Salt Lake City (8.7), #74 Minneapolis (11.1 #48 Los Angeles (15.6), #28 Dallas (19.7, just below Oakland and Philadelphia), #23 Kansas City Mo (23.2), #7 Washington D.C. at 40.6 (just below Detroit), #3 New Orleans at 44.0 and the grand prize winner, #1 Gary, Indiana at _79.4._ Lordy.
Figures are derived from the FBI unified crime report, which is available online at fbi.gov, but doesn't give the statistics in quite this format.