The Most Dangerous City in America

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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The Most Dangerous City in America

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Lists of dangerous states are usually built on the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program and its numbers on property and violent crimes. According to MSN, the most recent results, based on crimes per 1,000 people, rank Memphis as the most dangerous city in the country. Its rate is 20.71. This is well ahead of second-place Detroit at 20.03. (Discover each state’s worst city to live in.)

According to local news outlet Action 5, Memphis’s crime rate has worsened recently. The University of Memphis Public Safety Institute and the Memphis Shelby Crime Commission released a study that showed crime rose 11.3% in the first three quarters of 2023.

Despite local efforts, crime continues to rise, based on local data. The Memphis Shelby Crime Commission from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation posted information that property crime and violent crime rose from the first quarter of 2021 to the same period in 2023.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Memphis had a population of 621,056 in 2022. That dropped slightly from 646,889 in 2010. That population is 64% Black and 27% white.

Memphis’s median household income is $43,981, well below the national average of about $70,000. The poverty rate is extremely high at 24.2%.

Most cities on the dangerous cities list are poor, which shows up in MSN analysis. Much of the middle-class population has moved, along with many businesses. City services fall apart, and schools are often substandard. These trends will not reverse themselves, so those cities will remain poor and crime rates will stay high.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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