Why is East Providence, Rhode Island so murdery?

East Providence sits in its own little panhandle in north-eastern Rhode Island, with water between it and Providence, split into five neighbourhoods and home to 47,171 people. The towns on its list crowd close: Barrington and Pawtucket five miles away, Warren and Cranston seven, then a scatter out to Foster at nineteen, Little Compton at twenty-three and Sharon at twenty-four.

Only two of the twenty-three murders happened in East Providence itself, both in episode 508, which covers deaths in the early 1960s. The other twenty-one come in eleven episodes across ten towns around it, from episodes 2 and 3 in the late 1960s and 1970s, through the 1980s and 1990s, to episode 75 in 2008. No single episode carries the count: the biggest is episode 395 with four victims, while episodes 307 and 225 have three each.

None of this is crime statistics. It counts the show's cases, and the show picks the towns. East Providence ranks eighth because so many of them sit within a short drive.