South Carolina had the nation’s highest violent crime rate last year
See e.g. this article, excerpt below:
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The Palmetto State recorded nearly 800 murders, rapes, robberies and serious assaults per 100,000 residents in 2003, a State newspaper analysis of FBI and State Law Enforcement Division reports found. The state also had the highest per-capita violent crime rate in the U.S. in 2002, ranked fifth in 2001, and ranked second in 2000 and 1999, the data showed.
State officials say the high rankings come largely because South Carolina has a better reporting system than other states.
Serious assaults primarily have driven South Carolina’s high rankings. The state led the nation last year in aggravated assaults per 100,000 residents.
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Among South Carolina’s largest cities last year, Myrtle Beach had the most violent crime, with 250 crimes per 10,000 residents, followed by Spartanburg, Sumter, Florence and Rock Hill. Columbia, the state’s largest city with 117,000 residents, ranked sixth.
Horry County led in the overall number of total violent and property crimes per resident, with property crimes primarily driving that rating. Myrtle Beach police chief Warren Gall and Greg Hembree, the solicitor for Horry and Georgetown counties, attributes Horry’s ranking to the area’s large number of tourists. “If this place were as bad as these statistics are seeming to say, would we consistently have these 13 million visitors a year?” Gall asked.
Hembree said his office determined that when tourists are accounted for, the county’s rate drops from 834 crimes per 10,000 residents to 633 per 10,000.
South Carolina’s violent crime rate last year was more than 1.5 times higher than the rates in neighboring North Carolina and Georgia, which ranked 20th and 21st, respectively, in the newspaper’s study. North Carolina and Georgia’s rates were nearly identical with the overall U.S. rate.
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It's because we have better reporting! No, it is because of the Myrtle Beach tourists! Sheesh. So much for taking responsibility, "moral values" red state that we are.
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