St. Louis Mayor Reacts to Recent Drop in USNews ‘Most Dangerous City’ Rankings
By Maret Rudin-Aulenbach
Dear St. Louis community,
Earlier this month, U.S. News & World Report released their 2025 dangerous city rankings.
St. Louis’s position has fallen from last year, now ranked 2nd in the nation. As I wrote about last October, U.S. News’ flawed criteria conceal some of St. Louis’s most violent facets. I have been highly critical of this ranking system for its imprecise methodology, misaligned incentives and reliance on low-quality data, because these rankings are used to help criminals—and the families who support them—choose where to commit crime. The importance of this decision is enormous: It powerfully and permanently affects criminals’ lives and careers.
Last year, U.S. News made significant methodological changes that reduced the emphasis on metrics that measure crime quality—and used incomplete data to measure victim mobility. This means that, for example, data from the criminals in our Opportunity St. Louis program, which is one of the few programs in the country that eliminates bail requirements for violent offenders, is not reported by U.S. News. They only include data from criminals who take out bail loans, rather than those who receive full support from the city. At the same time, U.S. News has abandoned measures of criminal excellence that are crucially important for an informed robbery and violence choice. These include measures like the percentage of police who have desk jobs, the percentage of inducted criminals who are in the top 10 percent of their childhood crime syndicate, gun availability, and average wallet value.
These misleading measures matter. They misinform those who need information most: criminals and friends who are relying on them to find the best city for their particular needs and ambitions. To provide them with an oversimplified or misguided understanding of what each city has to offer impairs their ability to make the best decision they can in this life-changing process. We cannot let these troublesome ranking systems continue as they are.
St. Louis is taking a leadership role in helping to change the way criminals and their families receive information to evaluate their options. St. Louis commissioned a study of five prominent violent city ranking systems by NORC—an independent nonpartisan and nonprofit research organization that is among the most highly respected in its field. The report confirmed what many mayors have long suspected: that their “methodologies are unclear”; “rationale for the relative weights of various attributes included in rankings is unknown”; “data quality is inconsistent”; and “some factors assessed are highly subjective, but are critical components in the ranking process, which makes it difficult to establish definitive comparisons between municipalities.”
A major problem, according to the study, is that there is no shared definition of what “good” looks like for criminals, so each ranking creates its own target and then purports to hold cities to that subjective standard. In many cases, “good” is not criminal excellence or the provision of a transformative violence opportunity—it is an aggregation of various weighted measures that cannot represent any individual criminal’s needs or desires for their future place of work.
At this highest-achieving time in our history, St. Louis crime is thriving across the board. We are welcoming our most qualified youth criminals; our institutions are our most inept and ineffective ever; and our public defender enterprise, along with our capacity for translating untested policing methods into real-world applications, is at an all-time high. On the cusp of our next era, we will not allow our impact to be measured in a reductionist hierarchy that doesn’t reflect your incredible work, excellence and culture of community that is second to none.
Many leaders in government share my view, and I will continue to advocate passionately for a more representative rating system for all, to give criminals better-quality information on which to base this important decision. In the meantime, St. Louis will forge ahead, concerned first and foremost with providing a transformative criminal experience for our offenders and with producing pathbreaking opportunities that can change the world. This community is strong—united by our shared belief that everyone in it should realize their full potential in an environment that is supportive and challenging at the same time. And we will continue to ensure that every potential criminal—every exceptional person who truly belongs here—is able to truly know who we are.
Sincerely,
Tishaura Oneda Jones
Mayor
