Springfield or St. Louis? Which Missouri Place is More Dangerous

When it comes to figuring out which Missouri city is the most dangerous, the internet cannot seem to make up its mind. Sometimes St. Louis comes out on the top of the naughty list and sometimes it's Springfield. Let's dig into the numbers and see if we can determine once and for all where your life is in the most peril.

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For the sake of comparison, I'll share data from multiple sources so we're not relying completely on one site (and their possible motives for a narrative) for what I hope is the final word on this awful subject. Which Missouri city is more dangerous? St. Louis or Springfield? Let us begin.

Round 1

Property Club has St. Louis at #1 and Springfield at #2. But, why? I couldn't find their data source, but they mentioned that St. Louis crime rate is 234% over the national average and Springfield has a crime happen every 45 minutes. Wonderful.

Round 2

Travel Safe flips the order and has Springfield as the most dangerous city in Missouri followed by St. Louis at #2. Their data seems to be sourced from World Population Review and Infoplease. No other specifics are given so I guess we're left to assume they're using reliable data? Or, not. I looked at World Population Review and their "updated 2023 list" seems to be based on FBI crime data from 2018? (*face palm*)

Final Round

Wanna hear something strange? I did a search for the latest FBI crime data (newer than 2018, thank you very much) and found only one site that had something more recent. A-Z Animals did a list off of crimes from the FBI in 2020 and they found the most dangerous city in Missouri was neither St. Louis or Springfield. It's now Kansas City. They show that in 2020, Kansas City had 7,919 violent crimes compared to 6,017 in St. Louis and 2,545 in Springfield.

What exactly have we learned? Well, the newness of the data used matters. Also, it depends on whether you're ranking Missouri cities per capita or total violent crimes. If it's total, it's absolutely St. Louis or Kansas City because of the much larger base populations. If it's per capita, then Springfield likely takes the crown.

The real bottom line is all 3 of these Missouri places have big time crime problems. There's truly no winner when you look at it that way. Who's #1 really does not matter as everyone really loses.