U.S. Has 12 of the 50 Most Dangerous Cities in the World
A dozen United States cities ranked among the top 50 most dangerous cities in the world, according to Numbeo’s recently updated 2023 Crime Index. These cities were Baltimore, Maryland (No. 15); Memphis, Tennessee (No. 18); Detroit, Michigan (No. 19); Albuquerque, New Mexico (No. 23); St. Louis, Missouri (No. 27); New Orleans, Louisiana (No. 35); Oakland, California (No. 38); Milwaukee, Wisconsin (No. 40); Chicago, Illinois (No. 43); Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (No. 46); Cleveland, Ohio (No. 48); and Houston, Texas (No. 50). Of the 38 non-U.S. cities on this top-50 list, 22 were in Latin America, seven were in Africa, two were in Australia, and another seven were randomly scattered across the globe.
Urban warfare: This research shows that something has gone wrong in America’s cities. Homicide rates are spiking in select districts. Another study by John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, shows that the worst 5 percent of U.S. counties accounted for 73 percent of homicides.
Murder isn’t a nationwide problem. It’s a problem in a small set of urban areas, and even in those counties, murders are concentrated in small areas inside them, and any solution must reduce those murders.
—John Lott
That means bans on assault weapons and similar solutions will do little to reduce violent crime. As Lott demonstrated, the counties with the highest homicide rates already have low gun ownership. To fix the nation’s homicide problem, Americans need to focus on the problems in the urban war zones where homicides are occurring.
Long-term causes: American political commentator Heather MacDonald, author of The War on Cops, argues that the recent surge of murders is a result of the “Ferguson effect”—the concept that public hostility toward law enforcement in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting in August 2014 and the George Floyd strangling in 2020 has caused police officers in minority neighborhoods to back off from interacting with residents when not absolutely necessary.
Former Milwaukee Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. digs deeper and blames government entitlement programs for making his fellow black Americans in inner cities dependent on the state, fueling a breakdown of nuclear families that exacerbates criminal behavior. While one fourth of American children are raised without a father, this figure goes up to half or more in some big cities.
Prophecy says: God warns in the Bible that rebellion against His law produces horrific murders and bloody crimes. An end-time prophecy about the nations of Israel (America, Britain and the Jewish state in the Middle East) states, “Make a chain: for the land is full of bloody crimes, and the city is full of violence” (Ezekiel 7:22-23). There has indeed been a chain of bloody crimes in America. The nation cannot go a single minute, on average, without Americans committing or suffering two violent crimes. It can hardly get through a single day without experiencing another mass shooting.
The eternal, unchanging moral laws revealed in the Holy Bible bring peace, happiness and true freedom when obeyed. But because society rejects, ignores and mocks these laws, murders, rapes, robberies and other horrific crimes continue and worsen.
Learn more: Read “The Real Solution to Mass Shootings and Violence.”
