. . . not as bad as St.Louis, Flint, Michigan, or New Orleans.
A review of 2010 data shows that Baltimore has the fourth-worst murder rate in the country, according to recent number-crunching by The Atlantic magazine, corroborated by Justin Fenton in The Baltimore Sun.
Baltimore’s rate of 34.85 put us just ahead of Detroit’s, which was 34.46.
The Baltimore murder rate reporting in The Atlantic came as part of a “10 Most Dangerous Cities in America” list the magazine compiled, taking into account a number of other indicators besides murder rate (violent crime, aggravated assault, etc.) We came out ”8th Most Dangerous” by their calculation.
Fenton had reported the city’s murder-rate ranking as 5th-worst last week, but corrected it yesterday, explaining that the error had to do with the FBI’s numbers for Baltimore’s population being different from the U.S. Census numbers. He also recalculated and determined that Baltimore had the 8th-highest, not 7th-highest, rate of violent crime, as he had previously said.
Getting the numbers right is important, though, of course, surely irrelevant to the family of the latest child victim, 12-year-old Sean Johnson.
The seventh-grader had been watching television with friends on a Northeast Baltimore front porch when he was shot on Tuesday, dying later from his injuries at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.
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