This morning on the news, one of the big stories was that the new City Crime Rankings report was released by CQ Press, and that Detroit had regained the title of Most Dangerous City (St. Louis had the top spot last year). Of course, I wanted to know where Peoria ranked.
It doesn’t. Nor does Chicago or a host of other Illinois cities. The report explains:
The data collection method used by the states of Illinois and Minnesota for the offense of forcible rape did not meet the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) guidelines in 2006 (Rockford, IL, is an exception). As those rape numbers are not available, the following cities are not included in our Safest City rankings: Aurora, IL; Chicago, IL; Joliet, IL; Naperville, IL; Peoria, IL; Springfield, IL; Bloomington, MN; Duluth, MN; Minneapolis, MN; Rochester, MN; and St Paul, MN.
In other words, they couldn’t make an apples-to-apples comparison with the other cities; hence, no ranking. Too bad. It would have been interesting to see how we stack up against other cities our size.
or a good way to avoid a bad rating….
Perhaps a new museum will take care of the crime problem..?
Unfortunately, Illinois is one of the few states that do not report data to the FBI in a consistent manner and therefore these comparisons cannot be made. Someone explained it to me once why this occurred and how it could be rectified – as I recall it requires state action (to require reporting in a different format) and as we’ve seen lately, waiting for the state to take action on items can be a long one.
[...] CJ Summers recently pointed out, Illinois does not report crime in a manner compatible with other states for comparison, but they [...]