Niagara Falls now more dangerous than ever before, new study shows
In its’ never ending quest to excel at something, Niagara Falls scored a big win of sorts this week. The small town with big dreams was ranked as the 44th Most Dangerous City in the entire United States by a website specializing in information for prospective home buyers and business entrepreneurs.
Previously, what was once known as the Honeymoon Capitol of the World was ranked as the 49thMost Dangerous last year, and 53rd Most Dangerous in 2013.
According to the website NeighborhoodScout.com – which was essentially created to help people decide where they might want to live and do business – there were 3,460 crimes committed in the small city of 49,468 souls, nearly 600 of which were violent offenses.
What makes NeighborhoodScout’s analysis more comprehensive than others is the fact that the website takes into account all 17,000 law enforcement agencies in America for each city with a population more than 25,000.
Many cities across the country, including Niagara Falls, are served by more than one agency: they include municipal police, county sheriff, transit police, university or campus police, public school police, park and port police, tribal police, and more. By using this unique method, we’re able to provide an accurate and holistic representation of total crime known to occur within a city or town – not just those reported by a single agency.
“Once this complete count of known crimes is assembled for each city in America, we leveled the playing field by dividing the number of violent crimes by the population of each city, divided by 1,000,” the website states. “This reveals the violent crime rate per 1,000 population, allowing us to compare and rank the cities. The results are eye-opening.”
The most notable myth shot down by the new study is the perception that large cities are the only places that are dangerous. But high violent crime rates are less about city size than they are about economic issues that drive away the educated and affluent as they pursue employment elsewhere, and draw in and retain the less well-off and less mobile, the report states.
That is certainly the case in Niagara Falls, the most heavily taxed municipality in the most heavily taxed state in the nation. Poverty and street level crime have become big business here, with most of the top earners in the city being members of the police department, the fire department or the higher ups in the school district and various social service agencies tax payers support to deal with society’s debitage.
According to the report, 12 out of every 1,000 residents can expect to become the victim of a violent crime over a 12-month period, while 58 out of every 1,000 will be victimized by some sort of property crime.
Overall in New York State, just four out of every 1,000 people will become a violent crime victim in any given year, a difference of 300 per cent.
Despite the fact that city police officers constitute the majority of the 69 city employees who make more than $100,000 a year, Niagara Falls is a hotbed of street crime. Increasingly, tourists and locals alike are likely to become the victims of violent or property crime.
The report states that just 3 percent of municipalities across the entire country are more dangerous than Niagara Falls, including Camden, NJ, which ranked number one on the most dangerous list.
Buffalo also fared poorly in the newest NeighborhoodScout.com study, jumping nine positions from being the 40th Most Dangerous City in 2014 to the number 31 spot this past year. In 2015, According to data found on the website, there were 16,444 crimes in the 258,959 person city — over 3,300 of which were reported as violent.
As with so many things on the Niagara Frontier, the growing problem of street crime just keeps getting worse with each passing year. Those who have to live here know it is dangerous. It is only the politicians and others with a vested interest in pretending everything is all right who insist otherwise.
Clearly, whatever it is the elected and appointed leadership of the region has been doing to fix the problem has not been working.
