Violent Crime Rates in the United States

Answer: Washington D.C., Maryland and Delaware.

Question: Which region of the United States has the highest rates of violent crime?

We found the answer to the question above by taking the FBI's data for Crime in the United States 2005 and creating the map above using the data visualization tools available at IBM's Many Eyes web site. The map and full dataset are available here (the map may take some time to load).

The rest of our analysis was pretty straightforward. We looked for the greatest concentration of the biggest circles on the map, which correspond to the areas with the highest rates of violent crime, as measured by the number of violent crimes per 100,000 individuals. While some other states may also have high rates of violent crime, Washington D.C., Maryland and Delaware join together to form the region with the highest crime rates in the U.S.