Top 10 in Top 10 Most Dangerous Cities in America.
Beneath the Buried Bodies: Inside a Detroit Murder Squad
The city that brings the world's muscle cars, MoTown and Marshall Mathers are also the most dangerous cities in America. Detroit is the only city in the nation with a violent crime rate in excess of 2,000 per 100,000 residents - 428% higher than the national average. Detroit has seen one of the steepest declines in population in the past half-century. At its peak in the 1950s, the city was home to 1.8 million people. A range of factors, most notably job cuts in the auto manufacturing sector, have driven the residency below 700,000. It's not just attrition - it's the "escape while you can" death spiral in which the rest of us tend to despair. More than a third live in poverty, and more ominously, the COVID-19 pandemic has seen Detroit's unemployment rate rise from an already high 9.8% to an alarming year-to-date 39.2%. . When a city loses more than half of its population, policy becomes another matter. Vast swaths of the city contain rows of nearly empty houses with abandoned, decaying buildings that are breeding grounds for the nation's number one drug trafficking and violent crime. It's hard to see hope in such a haunted, heartbroken city that once literally boosted the region's economy.