Posted on Wednesday, November 21, 2007 - 1:33 pm:

quote:

November 19, 2007

GOOD DAY!

This is MONDAYMEMO, the weekly report from the RCGA President to Board members and other key investors. MONDAYMEMO is published by the St. Louis Regional Chamber and Growth Association, One Metropolitan Square, Suite 1300, St. Louis, MO 63102. To unsubscribe or change your address or method of delivery, reply to mondaymemo@stlrcga.org.


"NOTORIOUS MORGAN QUITNO RANKINGS" REBUTTED BY FBI, NATIONAL CRIMINOLOGISTS, CRIMINAL JUSTICE JOURNALSTS, U.S. CONFERENCE OF MAYORS, AND BUSINESS LEADERS: What do the FBI, American Society of Criminology, U.S. Conference of Mayors, Criminal Justice Journalists, and the RCGA all have in common? They all warn against giving any credibility to a publication that annually ranks U.S. cities as "most dangerous" and "safest."

These independent national institutions each noted this week that ranking cities by their crime rates is "meaningless, damaging, and irresponsible." As Dr. Rick Rosenfeld, curators' Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Missouri-St. Louis, says: it would be laughable were it not for the uncritical media attention that the annual ranking garners and the real harm it inflicts on the cities that get tarnished.

"You're not comparing apples and oranges; you're comparing watermelons and grapes," says Rob Casey, section chief, FBI Crime Statistics in Washington. The Bureau even has placed a disclaimer on the very data which CQ Press manipulates to come up with their so called "most dangerous and safest cities" ranking, noting that the data should not be utilized to rank cities.

As Dr. Rosenfeld explains: Criminologists point out that knowing the "city" in which a person lives reveals next to nothing about his or her crime risk, especially when compared with genuine risk factors such as age and lifestyle. The young and people who spend their evenings outside of the home are at far greater risk than older people and homebodies. The neighborhood you live in also matters. In all cities, serious crime is disproportionately concentrated in a handful of higher-risk neighborhoods. Differences in crime rates are far greater within than between cities.

Cities differ in ways that have nothing to do with their crime risk, but can greatly affect their crime "ranking." Pure geographic happenstance - the location of the boundary line separating "city" and "suburb" - is one. Some central cities are geographically small and do not include as many middle-class neighborhoods as more expansive central cities. If they did, the added population would lower their crime rate.

The City of St. Louis, for example, is less than 62 square miles in a metropolitan area of 8,824 square miles, and contains only 12 percent of the area population. Washington, D.C. is only 68 square miles in a metropolitan area of about 3,340 square miles, and contains only 11 percent of the metro population. In contrast, Phoenix sprawls over 515 square miles and is home to nearly 50% of the people in the metro area. And well over half of the residents of the Memphis metro area live in the central city, which covers nearly 300 square miles.

The American Society of Criminology noted at their national meeting last week in Atlanta that it is clear that, if crime rates are to be compared at all, the comparisons should be among metropolitan areas, not central cities. Doing so can change the picture dramatically. St. Louis, second in crime among central cities according to the new city "rankings," actually places 120th in crime among the nation's 300 metropolitan areas.

The FBI has on its crime data Web site a "Caution Against Ranking." It states: "These rough rankings … lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting communities and their residents."

Following last year's so called "Most Dangerous City" rankings, the RCGA and its national media counsel Fleishman Hillard, began a "due diligence" on the crime ranking issue. What we discovered was that the above-mentioned national institutions and organizations of subject experts had serious concerns about the methodology and legitimacy of the Morgan Quitno annual rankings. This past summer, we learned that Morgan Quitno Publishing had been purchased by CQ Press, a division of the Congressional Quarterly. Recognizing the greater credibility of CQ, the RCGA and FH invited the national organizations, including the FBI, to join a discussion with CQ editors and their publisher to urge a modification to the methodology of the annual rankings, and discontinuing of the past Morgan Quitno practice of publishing inflammatory and inaccurate declarations of "most dangerous" and "safest" cities. Following a very substantive and rigorous presentation of the these points to the CQ publisher several weeks ago, the group's points were rather arrogantly dismissed by CQ Press Publisher John Jenkins, who closed the 90¬ minute discussion with a dismissive comment to the group to "go fight crime."

The result has been a proactive presentation of the flaws of the Morgan Quitno rankings, now CQ Press rankings. We believe we have made excellent progress in beginning to "neutralize" the damage these bogus rankings have on communities. CQ Press claims it is just "the messenger." That is not true. Our view is that "the messenger" is knowingly providing false information, especially by using FBI data -- against the FBI's and others' warnings -- to irresponsibly, brazenly, and incorrectly "brand" cities "most dangerous" or "safest."

We will continue to partner with the FBI, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the American Society of Criminology, and the Criminal Justice Journalists to fight this. We will keep you informed.

Following are links of interest for more information:

Associated Press story: "Experts say 'most dangerous city' rankings twist numbers"
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/11/ 18/dangerous.cities.ap/index.h tml

American Society of Criminology new release:
http://www.earthtimes.org/arti cles/show/news_press_release,2 26260.shtml

U.S. Conference of Mayor's news release:
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi- bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY= /www/story/11-18-2007/00047079 38&EDATE=

NPR story "On the Media" program:
www.onthemedia.org; click on the piece called "Criminal Intent"

St. Louis Post-Dispatch story:
http://www.stltoday.com/stltod ay/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscit ycounty/story/
41A85C43D2B421E186257396001D38 A2?OpenDocument

Wikipedia entry on crime rankings:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A merica%27s_Safest_and_Most_Dan gerous_Cities