Meaningless stat of the day

A national Gallup Poll of people who don't live in Los Angeles—and by the looks of it have never visited—rates L.A. as the third most unsafe big city in America. The only ones that polled worse are Detroit and Washington. Hahn critic Mack Reed at LAVoice.org sees this as bad news for Mayor Hahn's reelection hopes. I don't get that. They don't vote here. If you did poll Angelenos who form their impressions by living here rather than off TV, I don't think very many would rate L.A. anywhere close to the most dangerous place—in Los Angeles County, let alone the nation. Anyway, the website CityMayors.com, using FBI stats for 2003, found L.A. the 35th safest big city for violent cimes and 28th safest for homicide. Worse on the murder list include Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, Miami, Phoenix, St. Louis, Cleveland, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Detroit, New Orleans...and so on. If you isolate on total crime in the 10 biggest cities, only San Diego and New York are actually safer than Los Angeles. The L.A. crime rate sits at almost half of worst-case Dallas and is lower than (in order) Detroit, Phoenix, San Antonio, Houston, Las Vegas and Philadelphia. That's not good enough, and I've heard nobody argue it is. But those Gallup pollees might want to turn off their TVs and get out in the real world more.