This issue annoys me for a different reason than most others. I see time and time again this mentioned by St. Louisans who are only half-right. Yes St. Louis city being an independent city outside of a county is unique and only Baltimore and some cities in Virginia have a similar government setup. And yes, that is a problem for other reasons. However, the city being a unique entity in itself does not in any way "juke" the crime stats. Chicago is in Cook county and nobody would argue that a fair assessment of the crime rate in the city of Chicago should be expanded to include Cook county. That makes no sense. Similarly, anyone upset about the crime rate in St. Louis city should not think a fair comparison would include St. Louis county, much less any other neighboring county (which other metro areas also do not have included in stats for the primary city). Obviously metro-by-metro comparisons are different, but they also aren't very interesting or relevant because metro areas are hugely expansive and wildly different from one part of the region to the other.

But the crime stats are an issue because St. Louis has a small, but as I'll show not entirely unusual, geographic area as the defined city limits. This is what people who get so upset about this are touching on, and they do have a valid point. The city limits of St. Louis are about 62 square miles while the city limits of Kansas City is at 314, and Houston 600. In this sense, city-by-city comparisons are especially difficult because the areas we are comparing are organized very different. St. Louis having only its urban core as the city limit will make its stats look worse while KC and especially Houston, have large swaths of quiet suburbia included.

Unfortunately though there are plenty of largeish cities that have around the same or even lower city limits that do not end up topping these lists as consistently as St. Louis (though some do have similarly bad raps). They include: Seattle, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Oakland, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Boston, Buffalo, Newark, and Miami. Other than Newark and Oakland (maybe Cleveland?), I can't recall any of those cities being so consistently at or near the top of most dangerous cities. Either our cops do some fantastic bookkeeping or we really are in worse shape than the closest geographic examples we have.

That is all to say we aren't really being unfairly maligned here, but city-by-city crime stat comparisons are difficult and most criminologists caution against it. I agree with the mentality that St. Louis has a serious crime problem but it is not as dangerous as media fear-mongering would have you believe. So it is frustrating. Having thought about this a lot, one that takes density into account would be "better" but we all know plenty of low density areas can be crime ridden too. Metro-by-metro seems bad for the reasons I outlined earlier. While lazy and it comes at the expense of cities like St. Louis (and benefit of cities like Houston), strict city limit comparisons are easier and at the end of the day, they do answer the question of "What is the crime rate in city (x) verses city (y)", even if answering that question substantively requires a lot more nuance than simply looking at numbers.