White People Aren't Very Good At Getting Away With Murder
01/28/2013
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As we all learned from watching The Rockford Files, small towns are extremely homicidal and conspiratorial. Every week, as Ben Stein noted back in the 1970s, ace detective Jim Rockford would venture forth from Malibu to some backwoods hamlet where all the denizens were covering up some sinister rural plot, only to make it back to the safety of the L.A. city limits by the episode's end, case solved.

Thus, Audacious "Validating Stereotypes Since 2005" Epigone calculates the rate of unsolved murders by state. The top and bottom 10s, with a higher figure indicating a higher percentage of unsolved murders:

StateUnknown
1. District of Columbia56.1%
2. Illinois55.4%
3. Maryland46.1%
4. New York44.0%
5. California43.9%
6. Massachusetts43.8%
7. Rhode Island42.0%
8. New Jersey41.8%
9. Michigan38.8%
10. Connecticut37.1%


41. West Virginia12.1%
42. South Carolina10.6%
43. Maine10.4%
44. Iowa9.8%
45. South Dakota9.2%
46. Montana8.2%
47. Vermont5.6%
48. North Dakota4.5%
49. Wyoming4.5%
50. Idaho3.9%


An accompanying visualization is available here. (Java only)

Oh, wait, it's almost as if TV detective shows reflect the screenwriters' neuroses more than the demographic realities. Maybe there are two different kinds of stereotypes: populist (Bad) and media (Good).

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