Holy crap, I was wondering what the heck is going on in St. Louis. I can't find any super clear authoritative answers with a quick Google search, but did find one comment suggesting it's at least partly a statistical artifact based on city borders:

> Some of it is a statistical anomaly. Most cities in this weight class annexed their counties, and thus averaged in a whole lot of white upper class good schools suburbs. If you look at st Louis city and county together, the crime stats drop to the middle of the pack with other metros this size. [1]

This has always been a problem in comparing statistics between urban areas, because the administrative boundaries are entirely arbitrary. I've long wished for some kind of algorithm that could define metropolitan areas in some kind of objective way for statistical comparison, based solely on population maps, but I'm not aware of anything that exists.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/StLouis/comments/9pfu4l/what_are_th...