The truth about the inaccurate “most dangerous cities” list

Every year a marketing firm working on behalf of the residential security alarm industry generates an inaccurate list of the “most dangerous cities” in the United States. Tukwila consistently makes the list because we have a small residential population, which is dwarfed by the significant amount of people who come to Tukwila to work, shop and play. On average, more than 150,000 people are in Tukwila every day; less than 20,000 people sleep here every night.

The group that distributes this list uses FBI statistics in a way that the FBI explicitly says not to do https://ucr.fbi.gov. The FBI statistics cover all crimes that occur in a city, but this company only applies it to the number of people who live in the city. If we were to manipulate other data in the same way this company does, here’s what that would look like: