According to the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, St. Louis overtook Detroit as the nation’s new most dangerous city in 2017. St. Louis has a violent crime rate of 2,082 per 100,000 people. That’s 8.8 percent higher than in 2016. In 2017, 205 people were murdered in that city. A violent crime or crime of violence is a crime in which an offender or perpetrator uses or threatens to use force upon a victim. This entails both crimes in which the violent act is the objective, such as murder or rape, as well as crimes in which violence is the means to an end.
In order to identify the dangerous areas of the city, we must consider the contributing variables to violent crimes. To aid us with our selection of variables, we considered the Theory of Risky Places proposed by Kennedy et al (2018), which “stated that risk levels of crime can and should be computed at places according to the interaction effects of known locational features (Kennedy et al, 2018),” and that risky places are a product of the combined effects of vulnerabilities and exposures to crime. In relation to this concept, it is important to consider the environmental factors as well as the social factors that may contribute to violent crime. Therefore, we decided to examine place features using the kaleidoscope. According to Barnum et al (2017), “the kaleidoscope represents an environment (e.g., City A) and the shards of glass embody place features (e.g., bars, restaurants, public transportation stops) within that environment. (Barnum et al, pg.204).” Therefore, Figure 1. Shows us important place features that may potentially dictate where a crime may occur.
The kaleidoscope represents an environment (e.g., City A) and the shards of glass embody place features (e.g., bars, restaurants, public transportation stops) within that environment.
St. Louis City is located in the eastern part of Missouri, it has an area of 171 km² with a population of around 310,000. Using the available sources online, we were able select 4 independent variables to be included in our study which are census tract population data, the number of population living under the poverty line, median household income, and bar locations.
This project attempts to use Geographic Information Systems (ArcGIS) to identify the most dangerous zones within St. Louis City. It is by no means a complete and accurate identification of the dangerous areas, but an attempt to show that GIS analysis tools can aid us in highlighting these areas given the different independent variables.
Violent Crime in the City of St. Louis 