CLEVELAND — A financial website claims Cleveland is the most dangerous city in Ohio, based on violent crime, poverty and unemployment data.
The website 24/7 Wall Street looked at violent crime rates, poverty rates and unemployment rates for cities across the country to determine which were the “most dangerous” in each state.
In 2017, the latest year the data was available, Cleveland had 1,557 violent crimes per 100,000 people (and a population of 385,381), more than five times the statewide rate of 297, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting system. A total of 5,999 violent crimes were reported, which was 17.3% of the state total. Columbus, a city with a population more than double Cleveland’s, had only 4,478 violent crimes reported in the same year.
Males were overwhelmingly the perpetrators of violent crime in Cleveland in 2017 — 80% male compared to 15% female, according to FBI data. A slight majority of victims of violent crime were also male — 57% compared to 42% female.
Highways, alleys, streets and sidewalks were the most common locations of violent crime in Cleveland; 39% of reported incidents happened there. Thirty-one percent of violent crime took place in residences and homes in Cleveland.
2017 saw a slight downturn in the violent crime rate compared to 2016, which was the most violent year in Cleveland in 10 years, according to FBI data. 2015 had the lowest violent crime rate in over 20 years, with just 4,506 total crimes reported. Uniform Crime Reporting data from the FBI goes back to 1995, when 8,150 crimes were reported by Cleveland police and the city’s population was nearly 500,000.
It should be noted that the FBI discourages the ranking of locations or making comparisons between locations when analyzing crime data. The FBI states that crime is a sociological phenomenon influenced by a variety of factors, and some data may not be comparable over previous years between of differing levels of participation and reporting over time.
Cleveland’s poverty rate, another statistic that 24/7 Wall Street considered when ranking most-dangerous cities, is 35.2%, over double the statewide rate of 14.9% and national rate of 14.6%.
Cleveland’s annual unemployment rate is 6.5% compared to the state average of 4.6%, according to the website.
