Written by DCist contributor Lindsay Gibson.

As noted by Wonkette, the FBI released it’s annual crime survey Monday and things for the District are looking grim. Or maybe not. This year’s report is a complicated read and D.C. is practically alone in having clear statistics for our city.

We had 195 murders in 2005, which comes to 35.4 per 100,000 citizens. That’s actually down from 198 in 2004, but still higher per capita than all the states.

But how about cities like Detroit, New Orleans and Baltimore; traditional contenders for the “America’s Murder Capital” moniker? Their crime rates are another story. The murder stats for each metropolitan area aren’t broken down with any sense of uniformity, and therefore it’s almost impossible to parse out cities from their state numbers.

In Illinois, for example, there are 7 cities listed and it’s easy to figure out where Chicago stands: 15.9 homicides per 100,000. In Louisiana, however, 67 cities are listed and New Orleans isn’t even one of them.

The reason may be the FBI’s intentional attempt to avoid such comparisons.

The report included a missive against media outlets ranking cities by rates of violent crime, calling the practice “merely a quick choice made by the data user [that] provide no insight into the many variables that mold the crime.” They warn that “many factors influence statistics.” Some of these factors include “degree of urbanization” and local “attitudes about crime.”

In fact, it’s easy to find the nation’s most urbanized areas. And I don’t know much about say, Boise, but in the District our attitude tends toward Crime = Bad.

So we’ll wait for the experts to crunch the numbers, but if the 122 murders so far this year and our famous “Crime Emergency” are any indication, D.C. may face another discouraging report next September.