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Talk About Tulsa => Other Tulsa Discussion => Topic started by: snopes on September 20, 2006, 09:06:56 AM

Title: Tulsa, One of the Most Violent Cities in America?
Post by: snopes on September 20, 2006, 09:06:56 AM
Has anyone looked at the most recent crime statistics (released by the FBI) for 2005? I see that Dallas is number one in total crime (nothing new), with Houston, Chicago, Philadelphia in the mix. Of course, these rankings are for the large cities and reflect TOTAL crime. My interest was piqued, especially regarding the topic of violent crime, so I went to the FBI crime statistics website to look at Tulsa's stats compared to other cities. What I saw was disturbing.

City    Pop. /       Violent Crime      
Tulsa   386,414   /    4,995
Dallas   1,230,303 /  15,429                
OkC   531,688     /  4,538
Houston   2,045,732 /  23,987
Omaha   412,128      / 2,327

When I crunched these numbers, I came up with the following regarding violent crime. It indicates that one out of every 77 people in Tulsa experienced a violent crime in 2005, while one out of every 80 in Dallas, and one out of every 85 in Houston. I'm not a math major, so I'm sincerely hoping that someone can show me the flaw in my mathematics. I took the population of each city and divided the number of violent crimes into the population to come up with the numbers. If this is correct, Tulsa is more violent than any of the cities on my abbreviated list, and we have a BIG problem. Please forgive me if I've broached a topic that has already been discussed, I'm new to this forum.

Tulsa / 77
Dallas / 80
Oklahoma City / 117
Houston / 85
New York / 149
Omaha / 177

The website where I gathered these stats is

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/05cius/data/table_05.html