St. Louis Is Officially the Least Safe City in America, Study Says

If you want a quiet life with few risks, you should probably move to Nashua, New Hampshire. According to a new study from WalletHub, it's the safest city in the U.S., followed by Columbia, Maryland, and South Burlington, Vermont.

But if you want a life of danger, with peril at every corner, you couldn't pick a better place to live than St. Louis — the least safe city in the whole damn country.

Yep, the vague anxiety you've been feeling about your personal safety turns out to be vindicated, at least if you believe studies by places like Wallethub.

The online attention-seeking site looked at 41 "key indicators of safety," from the presence of terrorist attacks to the number of mass shootings to traffic and pedestrian fatalities per capita in 182 cities across the U.S. The study also looked at the risk of tornados, floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters, as well as the unemployment rate, share of uninsured drivers and the foreclosure rate.

And from all that, they conclude we're the worst. Although it's safe to say there are a few caveats on this one. (There are always a few caveats!)


First of all, this is one of those studies that looks only at the city, not the entire metro area, so St. Louis is penalized for its relatively compact size and boundaries that include a host of, shall we say, difficult neighborhoods and not places like Clayton to counterbalance them.

Secondly, all of these types of studies are attempting to simplify things that are enormously complicated.  By weighting one various random factor over another, they're making choices that, in some cases, reveal the study's biases.

For example:  One of the factors that the study says points to the danger here is our high level of police presence. According to the study, St. Louis is tied for No. 1 in the 182 cities surveyed when it comes to the number of law enforcement employees per capita — and that's a metric they use against us in calculating safety.

That determination suggests WalletHub and Cori Bush have one thing in common: They both think we'd be safer with fewer cops.
Also noteworthy: Wallethub failed to give St. Louis a score for "natural disaster risk," for reasons that go unexplained. That's also true of the second least safe city, Ft. Lauderdale, which may provide the opening we need to argue our way up from the bottom of the safety list to "second least safe" status.

After all, where would you rather be living when a hurricane comes barreling across the Atlantic — Ft. Lauderdale, or St. Louis? Considering the study copped out in measuring either of our risk levels before assigning St. Louis bottom-of-the-cellar status, it's highly possible we were robbed ... much like many of our residents.




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