re: FBI list 10 most dangerous cities

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I fully expected New Orleans and Chicago to be at the top of the list.

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Chicago isn't even among the top twenty among major US cities and isn't among the top five in the Midwest. It's a lot less violent per capita than New Orleans and Baton Rouge, for instance. Don't get me wrong - I'd probably rather live in a lot of these places than the worst parts of Chicago, but...

It's just a massive city with some hellaciously bad parts that get a lot of press, but when taking per capita into effect, Chicago is going to come out looking a lot better than what its perception is. Most of the city is middling, and a good chunk of it is some of the nicest places to live in the United States.

Think of it this way: the far Southside and the near Westside (the two really bad parts of Chicago) probably have a combined population greater than that of either the city of New Orleans (~350,000) or the city of Baton Rouge (~230,000). However, those two places combined only account for about 15% of the city of Chicago's population. The Northside of Chicago - which is probably 1.5 or 2 million people by itself - is going to statistically overwhelm the violent areas by itself in these sorts of analyses. Chicago isn't Detroit or Baltimore or St. Louis or Oakland in that sense; most of the city is actually OK, and a lot of it is super damn nice. It's just that it's a huge city and the bad parts are really, really bad.