Each year, the FBI collects crime reporting from more than 18,000 city, county, state, university and tribal agencies and pulls the data together in one huge report. Here are six surprising trends from 2012.

Big city crime’s got nothing on the minor league of American metropolises. Chicago and New York, two of America’s largest cities, led the country in total homicides, but they had lower per capita homicide rates than the worst locales. In Chicago,there was one homicide for every 5,417 residents, while in New York, there was one for every 19,784 people. New Orleans, meanwhile, had one homicide for every 1,880 people; Detroit had one for every 1,832, and nearby Flint, Michigan, topped the list with 63 homicides among roughly 101,000 residents, or one homicide for every 1,613 people.

The South is America’s most violent region. The sixteen states and one district in the Southeast (Maryland, Delaware, Washington, D.C., Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas), make up America’s largest region with just over 37 percent of the population. It is also the most violent. The Southeast accounted for nearly 497,000 violent crimes, 41 percent of all reported violent crime […]

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