Is St Louis, Missouri or East St. Louis, Illinois More Dangerous?

This is the very definition of a no-win situation. Which side of the river is more dangerous if you're comparing St. Louis, Missouri versus East St. Louis, Illinois? It is a complicated answer and depends on exactly how you define danger.

I found a simple comparison of crime rates at Best Places, but that's really a superficial number which doesn't explain exactly what type of crime you're dealing with. For starters, here's the violent crime rate for each:

• St. Louis, Missouri - 86.8
• East St. Louis, Illinois - 96.2

If you look at property crime, it's a different story:

• St. Louis, Missouri - 85.1
• East St. Louis, Missouri - 42.3

For a deeper look, I did a comparison at Area Vibes and that reveals there is an argument to be made that St. Louis, Missouri is much more dangerous than East St. Louis, Illinois when you look at the crime rate for every 100,000 people:

• St. Louis, Missouri - 1,471
• East St. Louis, Illinois - 496

For the record, they give both cities an F for crime.

The best comparison I could find for measuring crime in St. Louis, Missouri versus East St. Louis, Illinois was from the database at Wolfram Alpha. Here are numbers from the most recent crime data:

St. Louis, Missouri violent crime per year

• 1,475 robberies per year
• 3858 aggravated assaults per year
• 265 rapes per year
• 194 - murders per year

East St. Louis, Illinois violent crime per year

• 32 robberies per year
• 173 aggravated assaults per year
• 27 rapes per year
• 36 murders per year

You can draw your own conclusions, but the real takeaway is the raw crime data for the cities named St. Louis on both sides of the river reveal huge problems.