Council Bluffs Top Iowa’s Most Dangerous City List

Dubuque Not In Top 40

Roadsnacks published a 2021 ranking of Iowa's most dangerous cities, and found the most dangerous to be Council Bluffs.  Crime statistics were weighed against population totals to determine the danger index of the 64 largest cities and towns in Iowa.

Dubuque sits comfortably back in 41st place, a move back from its previous ranking of 27th.  Dubuque is ranked as less dangerous than Maquoketa, Oelwein, and Independence, in addition to larger cities like Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, and Davenport.

New data is due out next month, and Roadsnacks promises an update when it becomes available.

See the rankings and check out the methodology here: roadsnacks.net/most-dangerous-cities-in-iowa/.  Be aware, the headlines and data labels aren't exactly clear.

On a completely separate note, have you ever padded an article to increase its word count in order to reach a specific target number? Perhaps while writing a paper in high school or college, you needed some extra words to reach the number the teacher or professor assigned. Or maybe you wanted to improve the look of a paper as it layed out on a page, so you added some extraneous words in order to make the paper look more appealing. Although I can't say with any degree of certainty, I believe padding your word count with unneccessary text would be an example of a workaround, a short-cut someone assigned a minimum word count might take in an effort to meet a requirement. Although I try to avoid padding articles simply to increase their word count, I enjoy seeing examples. If you see specific cases of this practice, please share them with me here. I'd love to see some good ones, as they always make me smile.

The author, Tim Koehler, is a native to the Dubuque area, long-time radio host, dork, father, part-time toupee model, very stable genius and horse stable shoveller, regular napper, Time Magazine Person of the Year 2006, teller of stories and bad dad jokes.