Houston Ranked 4th Most Dangerous City in Texas

Data visualization firm 1point21 Interactive in San Diego was commissioned by Houston criminal lawyer Paul Darrow to take a deeper look into crime across Texas. The goal was to rank each big city (with over 100,000 residents) from safest to most dangerous across the state. The results were a little surprising with few border towns listed.

The most dangerous city in Texas according to this report is actually Odessa followed by Corpus Christi, Beaumont, Houston, and Amarillo rounding out the 5 most dangerous. In order to come up with the rankings, researchers sorted 900,000+ crimes in Texas from 2014 including everything from petty theft to murder. Taking it a step further, they then took into account investment in police for each city and community socioeconomic factors such as poverty and unemployment weights. They assigned a weight to each of the 3 categories: Crime - triple weight, Police Investment - full weight, and Community socioeconomic factors - full weight.

This methodology allowed researchers to come up with unique and inclusive rankings rather than solely relying on crime data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program. If this hadn’t been the case and the only ranking factor was crime rate, Beaumont would have been most dangerous, followed by Houston and Amarillo, but this would have been an inaccurate report give as higher crime rates can be caused by a range of factors including more police presence or more accurate crime reporting. Just because a city has more crime per capita, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s more dangerous.

When it comes to lowest investment in police, Midland was ranked first then Brownsville and Plano. The cities found to have the highest community risk factors were Brownsville, Laredo, and Pasadena.

According to this report, the safest cities in the state are:

1. Round Rock
2. Frisco
3. Richardson
4. Pearland
5. Carrolton