[thematrixturtle]

> In the US in the 90s, your lifetime likelihood of victimization was estimated to be around 80%; the odds of suffering criminal injury hovered at 40%.

Any source? These figures seem absurdly high, and I say that as a former resident of NYC in the 90s.

[somenameforme]

I decided to run a binomial on it, because these sort of things can be quite counter-intuitive, and I was also curious! My only assumption was a lifetime of 80 years. And it turns out the magic rate to get a 40% criminal injury expectation (over a lifetime of 80 years) is if you're in an area with a violent crime rate of at least 6.4 crimes per 1000 people per year.

The FBI gives [1] a national violent crime rate (in 2019) of 366.7 per 100,000, so 3.7 per 1000. However, in the 90s the violent crime rate peaked at 7.6 per 1000 [2] and wouldn't fall below 6.4 until 1996. So the conclusion is that his numbers seem pretty much spot on.

Of course it's also somewhat misleading in another way though. Violent crime is not normally distributed and influenced heavily by demographics and location. Detroit has an aggravated assault rate (which is just one component of the criminal injury rate) of 15.2 per 1000 people, while Irvine, California has a rate of 0.2 per 1000 people. It's one of the many cases where the average doesn't really tell you anything at all about your own chances for an outcome.

[1] - https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

[2] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-...

[giantg2]

The 80% lifetime chance of being a victim of a crime sounds about right. How many people can say they've never had some sort of property stolen?

The 40% lifetime injury chance sounds a little high. I wouldn't be surprised if it was around 25% though. Obviously this is all anecdotal.

[sushibowl]

I found a 1987 report from the bureau of justice statistics: https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/lifetime-likelihood...

Uses data from approximately the 1975-1985 period, so not about the 90s.

[tablespoon]

>> Any source? These figures seem absurdly high, and I say that as a former resident of NYC in the 90s.

> Uses data from approximately the 1975-1985 period, so not about the 90s.

Also, wasn't violent crime notoriously high during that period? For instance, my understanding was Times Square used to be gritty and a little dangerous, then Giuliani turned it into a Disneyland in the 90s.

[ghaff]

I don't know how actively dangerous Times Square was but for it and 42nd Street "gritty" is a pretty good description. You see remnants of it at e.g. the Port Authority, aka one of the world's worst bus stations. Being there late at night was... interesting (as I once was). For a lot of people who knew NYC in that era, the "Disneyfication" isn't the worst thing that could have happened.

[decafninja]

My dad commuted to his office somewhere in Midtown Manhattan in the 1980s. One day I was rummaging through his briefcase and found a steel baton. I asked him what it was for and he said it was to protect himself from the bad guys.

As a kid I distinctly remember being somewhat afraid whenever my family had reason to go into NYC from our home in NJ.

I know he's controversial, but that fear subsided at some point during Guiliani's term. Yes I know today he seems to have become a total crazy loon, but I highly respected him as mayor for making large swathes of NYC feel safer. And yes, I know some people loathe him even for his tenureship as mayor.

[ghaff]

I was visiting NYC a fair bit in the late 80s-00s and even worked there for a summer. But, while my friends there would roll their eyes a bit at "the proctor's" recorded messages in taxi cabs about buckling your seatbelt and things like that, in general they seemed to mostly think that Disneyfication was better than what preceded it. While I'm sure things were never as bad as they were in my younger imagination, there were a lot of places I would not have been comfortable walking, especially at night.