St. Louis has a long-running reputation as one of America’s most dangerous cities. For the last 20 years it has ranked in the top eight for violent crimes per capita, including murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary and motor vehicle theft. And since 1997, it’s consistently been among the top five. Cities that end up atop the crime rankings worry the negative attention will deter businesses from relocating to the region or dissuade tourists from visiting.

But St. Louis is different from others on the list, at least in Fitch’s view. That’s because St. Louis doesn’t just have a crime problem, he says. It has a crime rate problem. To fix that, Fitch and St. Louis city police chief Sam Dotson have proposed combining city and county crime stats, which would effectively lower the overall rate because crime within the county is much lower. If approved, it could be used as a model for other cities that believe they’re being unfairly compared on a national scale…

Today, the city of St. Louis is 62 square miles. Compare that with New York City (468 square miles), or nearby Memphis (315) and Kansas City (319). And even though St. Louis’s sprawling metropolitan area is much larger than those 62 square miles, it’s the numbers from that urban core that get reported in national numbers that are then used in rankings.