By Yael T. Abouhalkah, Kansas City Star Editorial Page columnist

The incompetence of the Kansas City Police Department has helped the city avoid showing up on a new listing of the nation's most dangerous areas.

CQ Press has published its rankings for 2008. The most dangerous cities are New Orleans, followed by Camden, N.J., Detroit (last year's No. 1), St. Louis, Oakland, Flint, Mich., Gary, Ind., Birmingham, Ala., Richmond, Calif., and North Charleston, S.C.

Kansas City was 18th on the list in the 2007 rankings out of several hundred cities.

And KC likely would have been even worse off in the 2008 rankings because violent crime increased in 2007.

However, the FBI did not publish KC's crime figures for 2007 earlier this year.

That's because the Police Department was incapable of keeping accurate numbers. The department used a new reporting method and couldn't do a professional job of measuring crime in the city accurately enough to give to the FBI.

CQ Press uses the FBI's numbers in compiling its list of dangerous cities. So it could not include KC in the 2008 rankings.

In other words, Kansas City is probably around the top 10-20 most dangerous cities in the nation. But we just won't have to suffer the bad publicity of seeing that information in a national report.