Blog | Should you be worried that Myrtle Beach is ranked the 12th most dangerous U.S. city?
Every year about this time, the annual debate about Myrtle Beach’s high crime ranking returns.
This time it is because NeighborhoodScout.com says Myrtle Beach has the 12th highest crime rate among small and large cities in the United States.
Read more about the rankings here.
We often don’t do a good job helping people understand what such a ranking means, and what it doesn’t. I’ll attempt to do that now.
The Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce and city officials usually dispute such rankings, saying it does not factor in the 16 million or so tourists we attract every year.
I’ve also questioned the rankings, largely because when we drill down into the data about the crime being captured, it seems to include crimes throughout the Myrtle Beach metro area, which has more than 10 times as many residents as the city of Myrtle Beach itself. If you include all of those crimes without also including that much larger overall population, the ranking will clearly be skewed.
It is also important to remember that a high “rate” does not necessarily mean a great deal of actual crime.
Take the NeighborhoodScout.com numbers from last year.
When you hear that Myrtle Beach is the 12th most dangerous city in America, it sounds as though there is mayhem and chaos.
But last year the city recorded 2 murders - 2 - and 475 violent crimes overall.
In other words, during the period NeighborhoodScout.com measured, 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.
For more context: While Neighborhood Scout ranks Myrtle Beach as the 12th most dangerous city, Myrtle Beach is not listed in the website’s top 30 murder capitals.
We’d like to record no murders, no rapes and no assaults, of course, but we have to keep things in perspective.
The website has determined that people in Myrtle Beach have a 1 in 61 chance of being a victim of a crime, compared to a 1 in 197 chance in South Carolina overall. That part is skewed because it only uses the city’s base population, which is extremely small, while the crimes being committed seem to include those from throughout the Grand Strand.
Beyond that, though, the number of crimes does not say much at all about your odds of becoming a victim, even though that’s what the website suggests. Most crime involves people who know each other, and in South Carolina, we have one of the highest rates of domestic violence in the nation.
A crude way to say it is if you aren’t involved in domestic violence incidents, aren’t in the street drug game and the like, your chances of being the victim of a violent crime is actually pretty low. We should care that anyone is in the cross hairs - strangers, family or foe - for whatever reason and strive to reducing even those things, but let’s not pretend that everyone’s odds are the same.
The scariest, most disturbing crime is of the random variety because everyone is equally likely to be a victim of such crime. From this data, there’s no way to tell if most of the violent incidents are random or targeted, but based on what we know about domestic violence in this state, it is not crazy to assume that most of these incidents are not random.
Of course recently we have had some of the most disturbing crime, with the murder of gas station clerks, which is why it made sense for the police to set up a special task force to combat it.
And remember this. We are in an era in which crime, particularly violent crime, has been falling for a few decades now. These kinds of rankings should not be summarily discounted, but they should always come with heavy caveats because of the reasons I outlined above.
The NeighborhoodScout.com folks say they have accounted for just about everything and believe the rankings serve a good purpose.
The website says its list is valuable and accurate and takes into account the number of tourists:
“Our map may show census tracts assigned to a city for visual purposes, based on a spatial overlay of census tracts to municipal boundaries. But rest assured, the crime data used on our site and for the development of this list is purely as depicted above: the violent crimes that occurred within the city, along with the population of the city.”
It also says this:
“Also interesting is the inclusion of several recognizable American tourist destinations on the list. Myrtle Beach 12, Atlantic City 8, Daytona Beach 34, and Niagara Falls 45 all make the cut, in spite of their small permanent populations. In these cities, with their constantly-refreshing populations of visitors, the question of who is committing these crimes comes up. How does this unstable population foster such high crime rates? Is it that more crime is directed towards tourists? Or do the visitors bring conflict with them? Also, why do these other equally top tourist cities not make the list: Hilton Head or Charleston, (both in South Carolina like much more dangerous Myrtle Beach), Palm Beach, West Palm Beach, and Sarasota (all in Florida like much more dangerous Daytona Beach), Virginia Beach, Southampton, Newport, RI, Monterey, or even Las Vegas?”
A former colleague, David Wren, took on this question in 2008 and found that most of the crimes committed in Myrtle Beach are by locals - not tourists.
Part of his analysis found:
Local officials say the CQ Press report is skewed because it does not take into account about 14 million tourists who visit Horry County each year. When those tourists are factored into the population, officials said, this area's crime ranking falls to No. 149 out of 338 metro areas CQ Press ranked.
Booking reports at the county jail, however, indicate that tourists rarely commit violent crimes while they are here on vacation and they play only a minor role in this area's overall violent crime ranking. A review of more than 14,000 booking reports by The Sun News shows 83 percent of the people charged this year with committing a violent crime live in either Horry or Georgetown counties.
Tourists sometimes are the victims of violent crimes, such as robberies and sexual assaults, "because they tend to let their guard down while they are on vacation," said Greg Hembree, solicitor for the state's 15th judicial circuit.
Few tourists, however, perpetrate the types of violent crimes that can make a place dangerous.
"I agree with that," Hembree said. "You don't have a lot of tourists coming here to knock off a liquor store."
Violent crimes include robbery, aggravated assaults, rape and murder, according to the FBI. CQ Press combines those crime numbers with statistics for the property crimes of burglary and auto theft and then divides the total by permanent population to arrive at its rankings.
Local law enforcement officials said lumping nonviolent burglaries and auto thefts together with violent crimes can make a metro area appear more dangerous than it really is. In addition, S.C. agencies report less serious crimes - such as simple assault and domestic violence - with the more serious aggravated assault crimes. Agencies in some other states only include the more serious assaults, which makes Horry County and other S.C. metros appear to have a higher violent crime rate.
The Sun News, in its analysis of crime arrests, did not include those less serious assaults to get a clearer picture of this area's violent crime rate.
The Sun News identified 671 bookings for serious violent crimes, or about 4.6 percent of total bookings at J. Reuben Long Detention Center. Of that number, 551 people had home addresses in either Horry or Georgetown counties.
Even if the larger population number is included, rather than just the roughly 30,000-strong permanent population of Myrtle Beach, the ranking may or may not change much. (Charleston’s permanent population is much larger than Myrtle Beach and that city doesn’t get nearly as many tourists, so it is not an apples-to-apples comparison.)
That’s part of my problem with NeighborhoodScout.com. It knows there is a different, legitimate way to look at this but still doesn’t account for it, essentially saying it doesn’t matter.
Beyond that is just a more fundamental issue. Comparing cities this way is akin to ranking the effectiveness of school districts based on average SAT scores.
It makes little sense because there are a thousand variables that can not be accounted for, even while including these numbers.
We also know that crime rates tend to be higher in areas where the level of poverty is highest. About 60 percent of students in Horry County Schools are eligible for free or reduced lunch, a measure of poverty. And the Myrtle Beach metro area consistently records the lowest average annual wages in the country.
While your individual odds of becoming a victim of crime varies greatly, even inside Myrtle Beach and the Grand Strand overall, depending on where you live and what you do, there’s one thing that must happen to bring down the area’s high crime rating: help lift more people out of poverty.
This story was originally published February 3, 2015 at 10:46 AM with the headline "Blog | Should you be worried that Myrtle Beach is ranked the 12th most dangerous U.S. city?."