When taking that into consideration, I asked myself is Chicago really that dangerous? Well the answer is yes and no. In comparison to other major cities like New York and Los Angeles, yes Chicago is deadly. New York has a population of about eight million people, and LA has a little over three million people. Chicago had more murders than both of those cities combined. There were 762 murders in Chicago last year. That number more than doubled the amount in Detroit and Memphis.
However when you look at those numbers and based it on population, Detroit and Memphis were more deadly. The population in Detroit is less than 700,000; in comparison, Chicago has over 2.1 million. There were 302 murders in Detroit last year and if you take an educated guess and say that they had the population of Chicago; the murders would be higher. Based on the numbers, if Detroit had 2.1 million people; there would be about 900 murders. The same argument could be made for Memphis, which has a population of around 650,000 people and 228 murders for 2016.
I talked to a friend from Chicago and she said that a spotlight is on Chicago because of Obama. She said that people want to highlight how he hasn’t been able to come up with solutions to save his hometown city. That may be true. Especially considering there have been increase in other big cities such as Philadelphia. There was a 11 percent increase in homicides from 2015 to 2016. This included a deadly spree where five people were killed in a span of 15 hours. That particular day was also the day that Meek Mill’s cousin got killed.
Another factor that needs to be taken in consideration is that Chicago has a weekly crime summary of the violence. In comparison, other cities like New Orleans has a quarterly summary. This data gives a closer look on what is going on in the city.
The bottom line is that there is a major problem going on in the city of Chicago. By the same token, this problem exists in a lot other also. That should be taken into consideration when the national media only chooses to report the problems in Chicago, without reporting other cities. A lot of residents moved to other cities and are still faced with the same problems that plagued them in Chicago.