Uh oh, new report shows border towns relatively safe but Mcallen safest: Lunch Time Again!

Map shows how Texas Border towns compare to rest of nation in safety

From Governing.Com
By Ryan Holeywell

Rick Perry went on FoxNews last week to criticize Obama for failing to protect the Texas border. In a case of remarkably good timing, Perry’s appearance on Fox happened the very same week the FBI released its Uniform Crime Report, an annual compilation of crime statistics from every city of more than 100,000 people. Those figures reveal the border clearly isn't a violence-plagued war zone.

Governing examined the rates of violent crimes – murders, forcible rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults – among the four Texas border cities with populations qualifying for the report: El Paso, Laredo, McAllen and Brownsville. All of those cities had violent crime rates below the median average of American cities in the study (though Governing did not include Chicago and a handful of small cities that lacked comprehensive data for the purposes of this analysis). In fact, El Paso had a murder rate of .80 for every 100,000 residents – one of the very lowest in the country.

It’s also worth noting that the four border cities in Texas all have lower murder rates than the four largest cities in the state. Houston’s murder rate, for example, is nearly 15 times that of El Paso. Because Governing analyzed rates, not absolute numbers, that figure already accounts for the difference in population. Put another way, even though Houston’s population is roughly 4 times that of El Paso, it had 54 times as many murders.

The border cities also performed better than the large cities in terms of overall rate of violent crimes, except for Laredo, which has a slightly worse violent crime than Austin.  OUCH!