The District of Columbia is the 27th-most-dangerous city in the United States, according to a newly released book based on annual FBI Uniform Crime Reports.

The book, “City Crime Rankings,” published by CQ Press, a division of Congressional Quarterly Inc., analyzes statistics for 378 cities with populations of at least 75,000 and 333 metro areas.

Alexandria is 292nd on the list of most dangerous cities. It was the only other city in the Washington metro area included in the book.

The D.C. metropolitan area, which includes parts of Maryland and Northern Virginia, ranked 141st most dangerous in its category.

This story continues below
Advertisement

The rankings are based on yearly statistics in six crime categories — murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary and motor-vehicle theft.

Washington, D.C., was ranked safer in 2006 than the year before, when it was ranked the 19th-most- dangerous city.

Alexandria became more dangerous in 2006, according to the book, which last year listed the city at 299th most dangerous based on its 2005 crime stats.

William Chambliss, professor of sociology at George Washington University, called the FBI Uniform Reports the book relies on “unreliable.”

“They’re subject to manipulation by police departments,” Chambliss said. “Maybe it’s to increase the budget or to show how effective they are at lowering crime.”

To determine a city’s rankings, the report’s authors plugged crime statistics into a formula that measured how a city or metro area compared with the national average for a given crime category. The outcome was then multiplied by a weight assigned to each of the six crime categories. The sum of the weighted numbers became the cities’ scores.

A city or a metro area is excluded if one of the six crime categories is missing from FBI reports.

Chicago and Minneapolis were excluded due to incomplete reports.