Memphis made a top 25 list, but unfortunately, it wasn’t one we wanted to be on.
We had two neighborhoods in the 25 most dangerous neighborhoods in the U.S. – #11 (Bellevue Boulevard/Lamar Avenue) and # 7 (Warford St/Mount Olive Road.
The rankings were compiled by WalletPop based on the exclusive neighborhood crime information from NeighborhoodScout.com. NeighborhoodScout.com said it collects data from all 17,000 law enforcement agencies in the U.S.
Based on that data, the two Memphis neighborhoods cracked the top 25 most dangerous neighborhoods. Dallas and Kansas City also had two neighborhoods on the list and Chicago had four.
The most dangerous neighborhood, according to the listing, is in a Cincinnati where people have a 1 in 4 chance of being a victim of crime.
In Memphis, the Bellevue area has a 1 in 8 chance of becoming a victim of crime, and in the Warford area, it is 1 in 7.
That compares with a 1 in 64 chance in our entire city. According to NeighborhoodScout, Memphis is safer than 2% of the cities in the U.S. (with more than 25,000 population). In the city rankings, Memphis is #41 behind cities like Atlanta, Las Vegas, Orlando, Charlotte, Chattanooga, Tampa and Salt Lake City with 218 crimes per square mile, compared to 323 per square mile in Atlanta. The U.S. average is 49.6.
Nashville was not in the top 100 most dangerous cities.
Closer to home, West Memphis is the 74th most dangerous city in the U.S. where there is a 1 in 57 chance of becoming a crime victim.
While there has been some marginally good news on the crime-fighting front lately, it’s unlikely to get significantly better any time soon. The unemployment rate for Shelby County is 9.6%, but in Memphis, 1 out of 3 people in the labor force is either unemployed or not looking for work any longer.
