I can't reply to your other comment because it's dead. However, I wanted to respond to this: > And FWIW, every single small city I checked around 2 hours outs

I can't reply to your other comment because it's dead. However, I wanted to respond to this: > And FWIW, every single small city I checked around 2 hours outside of Chicago has property crime rates worse than Chicago! Isn't that amazing? No, it isn't, unless you're deluded enough to believe their nonsense. There's a lot of Midwest outside of that region. Even if what you say is true*, it's a skewed sample that can't reasonably be assumed to represent the whole. * Which I doubt, especially there can be confounding effects in whatever statistics you're looking at, like differing reporting rates (which was already called out in this thread or a similar one, w.r.t San Francisco).