Tampa Bay Area City Ranks Top 10 In U.S. Homicide Rates

This isn't something you generally want to be known for. A Tampa Bay area city ranks in the top 10 for the U.S. homicide rates. The U.S. has seen an increase in homicides over the past few years, but is finally starting to fall. This city beat other big markets in the ranking like Chicago, Las Vegas, Atlanta, and New Orleans.

We got this info from WalletHub. They compared 40 of the largest U.S. cities based on per capita homicides from March-May in 2023 and compared them with the same months in 2022 and 2021. It may not be a shock when we say the city with the number 1 homicide rate is Memphis, Tennessee. The only other Florida city to make the list was Jacksonville at number 35. Click here to see the full list of rankings.

St. Petersburg ranked number 7 in Wallet Hub's list. They actually had the second biggest jump in homicides compared to 2022. According to this website, your chance of being a victim to a violent crime in St. Pete is 1 in 144. The St. Pete police department has taken measures to reduce this rate. During 2022, the crime prevention division conducted 39 crime prevention seminars on topics ranging from personal safety to identity theft.

According to Neighborhood Scout, the violent crime rate (per 1,000 residents) in St. Pete is double than the state of Florida. The state rank is 3.92, the rate in St. Pete is 6.93, and the national median is 4. Property crime has an even higher stat that is above both the state's and the national median. In St. Pete, you have about a 1 in 39 chance of becoming a victim of property crime. To put it simply, there are almost triple the crimes per square mile in St. Petersburg than there are in the entire state of Florida.

We know how ominous "The most dangerous cities in Florida" sounds, but we think it's important to know. The good news is out of a list of 100 dangerous cities in the U.S., only 5 in Florida made the list. Of those 5 cities, none of them cracked the top 50 in this updated study. A lot of people probably assume big metros like Miami, Tampa and Orlando made the list, but nope!

We got this information from Neighborhood Scout. Their analysis includes crimes reported by all agencies. They studied cities with 25,000 or more people, based on the number of violent crimes per 1,000 residents. Data used for this research are:

Florida is known for some of the country's most bizarre crimes. And while all of them may be dangerous, they may not qualify as "violent." Driving a golf cart naked down I75, assault with food, and similar "Florida Man" crimes don't fall into the FBI category.

If you want to see how other cities rank, click here for the full study.