Deadliest Rivals

Milwaukee and Chicago have been rival cities for a very long time. Roughly an hour's drive apart, Chicago has always been bigger. Milwaukee is a big city, but it tries to maintain a small-town feel. Since the legendary Gangster Era of the 1920s and 30s, Chicago had the reputation for being a tough town with a lot of crime. But Milwaukee has its share and then some, as seen in the recent documentaries, "Growing Up Milwaukee," and "Milwaukee 53206." Statistically, how do they really stack up? Let's look at the numbers.

Percentages, not sheer numbers

In order to understand the real impact of crime on safety, you have to keep things in perspective. Chicago is a much bigger city. With a population of Chicago's in 2021 of 2.7 million people, it's ranked the 3rd biggest city in America, with New York as 1st, and Los Angeles as 2nd. Milwaukee is much further down the list, with a population of about 575,000 in the city itself and roughly double that in the metro area. Milwaukee and Chicago do have some overlap when it comes to the communities of Racine and Kenosha, Wisconsin, as workers commute to both cities from there, so we'll stick to actual populations inside city limits for the most part.

With a population more than 4 times that of Milwaukee, of course they're going to have bigger numbers of everything. More buildings, more cabs, more babies, more old people. So you have to compare good and bad things as a percent of the total. Looking at a much smaller scale, if 100 people were killed in Milwaukee or Chicago in a given year, that would be tragic, but it's overall a slow year. If 100 people were killed in a town with a population of 1000, or even 10,000, the impact would be much greater and the town would be much deadlier.

For this and the other analyses, I'll be using numbers collected by Dr. Andrew Schiller of Neighborhood Scout because it involves a better cross-section of data than most. According to Dr. Schiller:

" What makes Neighborhood Scout’s analysis more comprehensive than others is the fact that we take into account all 17,000 law enforcement agencies in America for each city with a population more than 25,000. Many cities across the country are served by more than one agency: they include municipal police, county sheriff, transit police, university or campus police, public school police, park and port police, tribal police, and more. By using this unique method, we’re able to provide an accurate and holistic representation of total crime known to occur within a city or town – not just those reported by a single agency."

Using them also gives us a look at more of what makes each city more dangerous. Not just deaths. As some have pointed out, deaths in 1880, 1920, 1970, and 2020 have to be compared taking into account advances in medicine, number of hospitals, and speed at which people can get access to care. So you can't just look at deaths. You need to look at actual acts, which Neighborhood Scout provides, namely the number of violent crimes per 1,000 residents. Violent crimes include murder, rape, armed robbery, and aggravated assault. Data used for this research are 1) the number of violent crimes reported to the FBI to have occurred in each city, and 2) the population of each city.

Pre-pandemic

To get an idea of where things are going, let's take a look at where they have been recently. After the Great Recession, but before the pandemic and even before the Trump Era. Let's look at 2015.

Shockingly, Chicago didn't even make the list of top 100 Deadliest Cities in America that year. Neither did New York, Boston, or Los Angeles. Others cities of smaller sizes from those states did appear on the list, but not the biggest ones. Because again we're looking at crimes as a percentage of the population, not total number of crimes.

Cities of different size in Illinois that did appear on the list in 2015 were, from the bottom up, Carbondale at 81, the capital city of Springfield at 70, Rockford at 20, Harvey, a town near Calumet City, at 13. So Chicago itself wasn't even in the ranking, and no town in the top 10. 2 in the top 20. Milwaukee ranked 23rd, with no other cities in Wisconsin making the list. In case you're curious, the top 5 that year were:

5 Oakland, CA

4 Saginaw, MI

3 Detroit, MI

2 Chester, PA

1 Camden, NJ.

One step more

Now let's go two full years into the Trump era, but the year before the Pandemic. The economy was making a huge upswing. Where did that leave our two target states and the cities within them?

Going from the bottom up again, at number 87 we have Chicago Heights, Ill.; capital city of Springfield appearing again, now at 61, making it even more deadly; Chicago finally hits the list at 57; Rockford went deeper into the top 20 at 16; Danville a city East of the college town of Champaign was at 11, and East St. Louis, a town just over the Missouri/Illinois border, long known to be a dangerous area, came in at a shocking #2.

Milwaukee was at 19, cracking the top 20. No other cities in Wisconsin made the ranking. The others in the top 5 were:

1. Bessemer, AL

2. East St. Louis, IL

3. Monroe, LA

4. St. Louis, MO

5. Detroit, MI

Now let's go to today.

2021

Crime numbers spiked during the pandemic, as did suicides. People were out of work, and largely cooped up with each other. Now a year after the pandemic, crime is still elevated. As I report the rankings this time I'll provide more detail.

Carbondale, Ill. returned to the list, coming in at 98. Kankakee also appeared on the list, at Carbondale's old spot of 81. Champaign, still down in the lower part of the state, with Champaign/Urbana being known as the college area, came in at 76. Chicago itself came in at 73, considerably safer than it was in 2019, dropping 20 points. Part of that may be fewer crimes reported because of the city no longer prosecuting certain crimes, but even so, that's the lower 25% of the list. Alton, another south Illinois town on the Missouri/Illinois border near St. Louis, came in at 55, near Chicago's 2019 ranking. East St. Louis dropped all the way down to 54, and the northern Illinois city of Peoria came in at 53. Rockford dropped considerably to 31, and Danville got worse, making it to 6. Milwaukee was at 23, dropping a bit from 19 in 2019, and once again no other Wisconsin cities made the top 100.

The top 5 were:

1. Detroit, MI

Violent Crime Rate (per 1,000 residents): 19.5

Your chance of being a victim: 1 in 51

2. St. Louis, MO

Violent Crime Rate (per 1,000 residents): 19.2

Chance of being a victim: 1 in 51

3. Memphis, TN

Violent Crime Rate (per 1,000 residents): 19.0

Chance of being a victim: 1 in 52

4. Baltimore, MD

Violent Crime Rate (per 1,000 residents): 19.0

Chance of being a victim: 1 in 53

5. Monroe, LA

Violent Crime Rate (per 1,000 residents): 17.9

Chance of being a victim: 1 in 55.

So overall, Illinois, with 8 cities in the top 100 most dangerous in America, spread around different parts of the state, is deadlier as a whole than Wisconsin as a whole. But Chicago is, and has been for some time, not as deadly as Milwaukee.

Is it guns?

Both Chicago and Milwaukee claim that the number of guns in the city are the problem, and that's a logical statement. Without guns, people don't get shot, and stabbing, bludgeoning, strangling, takes longer and can typically only be done one person at a time. So is there a correlation between the number of guns in these cities and the number of violent crimes? Let's make a broader comparison by states.

Here are the 10 states with the highest rates of gun ownership in 2021:

Montana (66.30%)

Wyoming (66.20%)

Alaska (64.50%)

Idaho (60.10%)

West Virginia (58.50%)

Arkansas (57.20%)

Mississippi (55.80%)

Alabama (55.50%)

South Dakota (55.30%)

North Dakota (55.10%)

In contrast, the states with the most cities on the list of top 100 most dangerous are:

Michigan 10

California 7

Florida 6

Texas 6

Tennessee 5

South Carolina 5

Ohio 5

Arkansas 5

Louisiana 4

Oklahoma 4

That's the top 10

Pennsylvania, Missouri, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts each have 3. Several other states have 2 or just 1. 18 states have no cities on the list.

Looking at the two lists, of the 10 states with the most guns per capita, only Arkansas, Alaska, and West Virginia appear on the list of states with most dangerous cities, and Arkansas is the only one that stands out as prominent, with 5. In fact, gun ownership in some of the top states in comparatively low:

So while guns may make it easier to kill people, total number of guns is not the key problem. And again, don't forget we're comparing violent crimes, not just deaths. You don't need a gun to commit all violent crimes, like battery, rape, or aggravated assault. So let's look back at specifics on Milwaukee and Chicago and see how things stack up.

Windy City vs. City of Festivals

Milwaukee has a crime rank of 8, making it safer than just 8% of US Cities. There are 13.5 crimes per 1,000 people in the city, compared to 2.9 in the entire state. The national median is 4. That makes the crime rate in Milwaukee more than 3 times the national average.

Your chance of being a victim of violent crime in Milwaukee is 1 in 74. 1 in 341 in Wisconsin. 243 crimes are committed per square mile in Milwaukee.

Of those violent crimes, assault is by far the leader. 5, 521 assaults reported in the past year, or 9.4 per 1,000 people. 1,928 robberies, at 3.3 per 1,000 people. 139,815 rapes, at .4 per 1,000 people and at the time of the report only 998 murders, or .2 per 1,000 people. Compare that to the national average and that's almost 4 times the number of assaults, 4 times the number of robberies, exactly the same percentage of rapes, and 4 times the percentage of murders.

Chicago is 50% safer, with 9.5 violent crimes per 1,000 people. Illinois as a whole is at about the national average of 4 violent crimes per 1,000, so again Illinois as a whole is more dangerous.

Your chance of being a victim of violent crime in Chicago is 1 in 105, again roughly a 30% difference. In Illinois in general your chance is 1 in 246.

As in Milwaukee, you're far more likely to be assaulted. 821,182 assaults in Chicago during the latest reporting period, at a rate of 5.7 per 1,000 people. Then robbery, 267,988, 2.96 per 1,000 people. Rape 139,815, .66 per 1,000 people. There have been 493 murders during this period, which is substantial, but again as a percentage of the population, considerably lower, at just .18 per 1,000 people.

Looking at those key stats side by side, you're almost twice as likely to get assaulted in Milwaukee as in Chicago, at 9.4 vs. 5.7 per 1,000. You're slightly more likely to get robbed, at 3.3 vs. 2.96 per 1,000. Less likely to get raped, at .4 vs. .66 per 1,000, and slightly more likely to get killed, at .2 vs. .18 per 1,000 people.