In a recent article released by MSN.com, Missoula was named the most dangerous city in Montana.

When I first clicked onto the article I fully expected it to be Billings, MT mostly because of population size. Also I just didn't think that the place that I call home would be considered the most dangerous in our state.

After seeing that they selected Missoula as the most dangerous in Montana, I wanted to know how they were judging these cities. It had to do with crime rate, poverty rate, and unemployment rate. Here is how Missoula stacked up:

City violent crime rate: 425.2 per 100,000
State violent crime rate: 349.6 per 100,000 (25th highest)
City poverty rate: 16.0%
City unemployment rate: 3.3%

The article went on to say this about living in Missoula:

Of the three Montana metro areas covered in the FBI UCR, Missoula is the most dangerous. While the state’s violent crime rate of 350 incidents per 100,000 people is slightly lower than the national violent crime rate of 373 per 100,000, Missoula is more dangerous than the state and the nation. There were 425 incidents of violent crime for every 100,000 residents in the metro are in 2015.

Poorer economic conditions can often be fertile grounds for violence, and Missoula’s 16.0% poverty rate is higher than any other metro area in the state as well as the statewide poverty rate of 14.6%.

I'm still very proud to say I live here but seeing some of these crime rates are alarming. I believe the one stat that hasn't been mentioned that should be brought up is how many crimes are drug related. Even more specifically, Meth related. If we want to clean up the crime rates for our area I think it starts with Meth addiction.

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