Which major U.S. cities currently have the highest violent crime rates per capita, and which party controls their mayor's office?
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Executive summary
Recent 2024–mid‑2025 reporting and compilations consistently place Memphis, St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore and New Orleans among U.S. cities with the highest violent‑crime or homicide rates per capita (examples: New Orleans 46 homicides/100,000; Memphis ~41/100,000; Baltimore cited with a homicide rate of 44.2/100,000) [1] [2] [3]. Multiple academic reviews and large‑sample studies find little or no causal effect of a mayor’s party on city crime rates, concluding that mayoral partisanship “made little difference” or had “no detectable effect” on crime, policing budgets or arrests [4] [5] [6] [7].
1. Which cities show up at the top of violent‑crime lists — and which metrics vary
Public lists and visualizations of 2024–mid‑2025 data repeatedly list Memphis, St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore and New Orleans among the highest by violent‑crime or homicide per capita; VisualCapitalist notes New Orleans leads with about 46 homicides per 100,000 and Memphis about 41 per 100,000, while other compilers flag St. Louis and Detroit for high overall violent‑crime rates [1] [8] [9]. Different sources use different measures — homicide rate, aggregate violent‑crime per 1,000 or per 100,000, or perception indexes — which produces variation in rankings [10] [2].
2. Why rankings differ: jurisdictional scope and data sources
Rankings shift because some lists use FBI Uniform Crime Reporting city‑jurisdiction data, others rely on CDC mortality data or local police reports, and still others use perception surveys like Numbeo; Wikipedia’s table warns that city‑vs‑metro measures and reporting choices change outcomes [10] [11] [2]. The Council on Criminal Justice emphasizes that careful, city‑by‑city monthly data matter for trend comparisons and that half‑year or year‑end windows can show different changes [12] [13].
3. Who controls the mayor’s offices in high‑crime cities — what the sources say and do not say
Available sources identify which cities have high violent‑crime rates (Memphis, St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, New Orleans) but do not provide a systematic city‑by‑city table tying each of those cities to current mayoral party control in the cited pieces; therefore, “available sources do not mention” a compiled list of mayoral party control alongside each ranking in this dataset [1] [8] [3].
4. What research says about party control and crime rates
Major, peer‑reviewed and working‑paper studies reviewed in the reporting find that the political party of mayors has little detectable causal impact on crime outcomes, police employment, budgets or arrests. A broad study of 400 cities concluded mayoral party “made little difference” for crime or policing; related multimethod analyses similarly report “no detectable effect” of local partisan politics on crime [4] [5] [7] [6].
5. Studies that find correlations — and their limits
Some earlier or smaller studies report correlations (for example, analyses that find higher violent‑crime rates in certain tiers of cities with Democratic mayors), but authors explicitly caution these are associations, not proof of causation, and results depend on city‑size strata and control choices [14] [15] [16]. Snopes and other fact‑checks show that simple averages or charts that omit confounders can misleadingly suggest partisan causation [17].
6. What this means for interpreting headlines and policy claims
Claiming a party controls “more dangerous cities” without accounting for population size, historical structural factors, policing practices, economic conditions and reporting differences is misleading; several expert reviews conclude that blaming crime trends on mayoral partisanship is an oversimplification [10] [18] [7]. Policymakers and commentators should instead focus on evidence‑based interventions and local context, as urged by the Council on Criminal Justice and other analysts [12] [6].
7. Practical takeaway and reporting limitations
If you want a definitive, up‑to‑date table tying the highest violent‑crime per‑capita cities to the current mayor and party, the supplied sources do not contain that compiled list; constructing one would require cross‑checking each city’s most recent crime statistics (FBI, CDC or local reports) with current municipal records or Ballotpedia for mayoral affiliation — an exercise beyond the available excerpts here [10] [19]. Note also that different authoritative datasets will change rankings; the evidence overall warns against simple partisan narratives linking mayoral party to crime trends [5] [4].
Sources cited above use the following documents: VisualCapitalist and related crime lists [1] [2], city crime compilations and Council on Criminal Justice updates [8] [12] [13], aggregators like The Global Statistics and Wikipedia caveats [3] [10], and cross‑cutting academic and fact‑check research on mayoral partisanship and crime [4] [5] [6] [7] [14].