10 Illinois Places with Highest Crime Index that Aren’t Chicago

There are a lot of ways to measure crime in Illinois. You can focus on violent crime and/or property crime. But, if you're looking purely at the crime index, there are 10 Illinois places worse than the rest and remarkably none of them are Chicago.

This Illinois crime index from USA.com is based on pure data. There is no narrative and it's not the opinion of a blogger. This is a database that I queried asking for one simple metric. Here is their definition of what these numbers mean:

"The crime index value is calculated based on the data using USA.com algorithms. It is an indicator of the crime level in a region. Higher crime index value means more crime."

Here are the top 10 crime indexes in Illinois:

1. 34,984 Sauget, IL / 318
2. 13,134 Brooklyn, IL / 807
3. 10,488 East Saint Louis, IL / 26,697
4. 9,405 McCook, IL / 212
5. 7,770 Cairo, IL / 2,688
6. 6,292 Washington Park, IL / 4,120
7. 5,970 Zeigler, IL / 1,850
8. 5,008 Harvey, IL / 25,225
9. 4,899 Madison, IL / 4,061
10. 4,270 West City, IL / 702

Where is Chicago? The USA.com database says the Windy City has the 26th highest crime index in Illinois. Surprised? I was.

Other Illinois cities of note include Danville which has the 13th highest crime index and Rockford at #17.

The interesting thing is you can run your own reports about different aspects of life in Illinois if you'd like to see pure numbers and not the potentially slanted opinion of a writer who may have his or her own agenda.