Math - Ugh

I have struggled with math since I was a kid, so help me out here. Violent crime statistics like murder are reported per capita, meaning per head or per person. Big cities, or more accurately the county or counties in which those cities reside, like L.A., D.C., NYC and Chicago are reported out per 100,000 people.  

So, the greatest chance of getting murdered in the entire United States is highest in which of the

above cities?  Incorrect. We must do the math to understand the news. The highest murder rate per capita is Memphis, which coincidentally is in Shelby County, Tennessee. Followed by St. Louis, Baltimore and Washington D.C. Birmingham, Alabama rounds out the top five. Memphis had 372 murders in 2023. Memphis has a population of 633,104. Thus 372 divided by 633,104 multiplied by 100,000 equals a murder rate of 58.75. 

Los Angeles and New York don’t even come close, with murder rates of 8.6 and 4.3 respectively. Chicago is a little tougher to compare because the city has a population of around 2,750,000 but the entire Chicago metro area is more like 8 million people, with 573 murders in 2023, Chicago has a rate of somewhere between 20.8 and 7.2 dependent upon which population data set is used. D.C. like Chicago is a more difficult comparison, as the city core population is about 689,000 whereas the D. C. Metro swells to over 6 million. So, I won’t do the math on D.C., but you can, D.C.murders for 2023 were reported to be 274.

With one murder and a population of 11,500 Shelby County, Iowa would report a rate of 8.73, putting it on par with New York and L. A. Two murders would increase the rate to 17.4 putting us at twice that of L.A. and four times the murder rate of New York City. 

I share this only to encourage all of us to really understand what we hear and read. As Mrs. Mooney sagely told me in fifth grade about math: “You’re going to need it someday”.

Bill Owen

Harlan, Iowa