The typical easy answer when you ask a question about violent crime in Missouri is the St. Louis or the Kansas City regions. New data shows the answer lies in a place that isn’t a part of either area, but it has the fastest rising violent crime rate in the state over the past several years.
I decided to query the latest crime numbers purely out of curiosity with no plans to share the results until I realized the data pointed to an unexpected crime hotspot in Missouri. Since I prefer to not trust just one source, I dug into the latest crime numbers from the FBI, the Show Me Institute, USA Facts and The Guardian. The bottom line of all the latest crime numbers shows that there’s only one Missouri place that has shown a sustained rise in violent crime over the past 5 years and it isn’t St. Louis or Kansas City even though they are on the naughty list, too.
What is the Missouri place with the fastest rising violent crime?
Answer – St. Joseph
There were two big takeaways behind the story of what’s been happening in St. Joseph:
- Local and state data indicate violent crime rates rising notably since ~2020
- Unlike larger cities, it didn’t fully drop back down after the pandemic surge
A close second was Kansas City, Missouri which has seen significant increases in homicides during and after 2020, but the trends there are inconsistent year-over-year. Homicide is obviously a problem in Kansas City, but St. Joseph is the most problematic city for a consistent rise in the worst types of crime…