Issac Bailey | Don’t overstate danger of living in Myrtle Beach - or Bikefest

The real estate tracking website NeighborhoodScout.com has done to Myrtle Beach what many Grand Strand officials have been doing to Atlantic Beach Memorial Day Bikefest.

The site, complete with an image of a masked man breaking into a home, judged the city by its worst elements, named Myrtle Beach the 12th most dangerous city in America and left a misleading picture of what it is like to live here.

In the way Myrtle Beach officials said negative national headlines from last May’s Memorial Day weekend was bad for tourism, being labeled one of the most dangerous cities in America can’t be good, either.

The ranking comes on the heels of an uptick in armed robberies in Horry County, including the murders of two convenience store clerks.

It’s enough to make people forget that the crime rate has been falling the past few decades and is at a historic low.

But all the data in the world can’t drown out people’s perceptions, particularly when rankings supposedly telling people which cities are most dangerous take center stage.

Myrtle Beach is not a dangerous place, even though it has to grapple with spurts and pockets of crime — just like every other place in the country.

The same is true of Bikefest, even though last Memorial Day weekend saw too much out-of-control traffic and an unprecedented number of shootings.

About that NeighborhoodScout.com ranking.

It is important to realize that a high rate does not necessarily mean a great amount of actual crime.

The label “most dangerous city” suggests there’s mayhem and chaos in the streets and a homicide around every corner.

During the period measured by NeighborhoodScout.com, the city recorded only 2 murders and 475 violent crimes overall.

That means Myrtle Beach saw a murder once every 6 months, one rape about every 8 days, one robbery every other day and an assault just a little more frequently than that. That includes assaults from non-life threatening shoves to the kind that end with serious injury.

We’d like to record no murders, no rapes and no assaults, but we have to keep things in perspective. We don’t live in a perfect world.

NeighborhoodScout.com said people in Myrtle Beach have a 1 in 61 chance of becoming a victim of a crime, compared to a 1 in 197 chance in South Carolina overall.

That, too, leaves a false impression. Neither the total number nor rate of crime says much about an individual’s odds of becoming a victim. Most crime involves people who know each other, and we have one of the highest rates of domestic violence in the nation.

In other words, if you aren’t involved in domestic violence, and aren’t in the street drug game and the like, your chances of being the victim of a violent crime in Myrtle Beach actually are pretty low.

We should care that anyone suffers from crime, no matter the reason, and strive to reduce it even if it won’t benefit us directly. We should be concerned when a fellow child of God is harmed. That doesn’t mean we have to pretend everyone’s odds of being victimized is the same.

Random crime, the kind that afflicts people who happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, is the scariest kind, the kind to which we all are equally susceptible.

That’s why armed robberies and the killing of store clerks are so disturbing.

They are everyday people just trying to make a living.

The NeighborhoodScout.com data does not tell us how prevalent random crime is in Myrtle Beach, and without that, the dangerous label is largely, but not completely, meaningless.

While an individual’s odds of becoming a victim of crime varies depending on where you live and what you do, an area’s overall crime rate is heavily influenced by its level of poverty.

The Myrtle Beach metro area, which encompasses most of the Grand Strand, consistently records the lowest average annual wages in the nation.

There is a way to improve our place in national crime rankings, no matter how flawed they are: lift more people out of poverty.

This story was originally published February 4, 2015 at 2:45 PM with the headline "Issac Bailey | Don’t overstate danger of living in Myrtle Beach - or Bikefest."