United States Cities By Crime Rate - Note About Population

Note About Population

Often, one obtains very different results depending on whether crime rates are measured for the city jurisdiction or the metropolitan area. The main reason is that the jurisdictional boundaries of cities vary widely, with some cities (San Antonio) containing over three-fifths of the total metropolitan population, and others (St. Louis) approximately one-tenth.

Information is voluntarily submitted by each jurisdiction and some jurisdictions do not appear in the table because they either did not submit data or they did not meet deadlines.

The FBI website has this disclaimer on population estimates:

For the 2009 population estimates used in this table, the FBI computed individual rates of growth from one year to the next for every city/town and county using 2000 decennial population counts and 2001 through 2009 population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. Each agency’s rates of growth were averaged; that average was then applied and added to its 2008 Census population estimate to derive the agency’s 2009 population estimate.