Who Has A Higher Violent Crime Rate: Bossier City or Shreveport?

The debate over crime between Shreveport and Bossier City has always been a hot one.

Shreveport's history of crime, and perpetual national rankings for high crime, paint a picture that Bossier is a much safer city by comparison. But it can be hard to compare numbers with two cities who's populations are so vastly different.

This is where the "per capita" measurement comes in. Per capita measurements are common in statistics to be able to measure different populations fairly against one another. In this case, using per capita as 100,000 people, we can fairly rank the crime rates between the two cities.

The way that per capita statistics work in a case like this involves bringing the population up for one community, and therefore the percentage of crimes, and leveling it against the other city's rates per 100,000 residents.

At the end of this measurement, the statistics for Bossier City don't look the same as the stereotype might suggest.

As stated above, the rankings that Shreveport sees on a national level when it comes to crime are pretty well known. Seeing Shreveport rated in the Top 20 nationally for violent crime rates is pretty normal. But if someone suggested that Bossier City would be rated the same Shreveport on a national level, you might see visible confusion.

But looking at the per capita numbers, Bossier City would actually be rated as a more dangerous city than Shreveport on a national level.

This recent WallStreet247 rating of the Most Dangerous Cities rated Shreveport as #25. The ratings were based on Violent Crimes per 100,000 Residents, but they were from 2020, a year Bossier City did not release crime data. If Bossier's most recent numbers would rank them at #16 in the nation on this list.

Check out a crime-by-crime comparison between the most recent published data from both Shreveport and Bossier City: