[reddog]

> including current faves Austin and Miami

Austin has 2.57 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters per 100K. Same year, SF has 6.35 per 100K. So SF is twice as bad as Austin. Your right about Miami though.

But 6.35 isn't bad. The murder rate in St Louis (for comparision to the US city with the worst) is 66.07 per 100K. And Colima Mexico (worst in the world maybe) is 182 murders per 100K.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_rat...

[Aeolun]

For comparison, Japan has 0.3, the UK has 1.1 and France has 1.3.

I know they’re in the linked table, just wanted to mention that even the best city in the US is still relatively bad.

[jefftk]

> even the best city in the US is still relatively bad

Your parent didn't mention the "best city in the US" though? Per the linked table it seems to be Irvine CA at 0.72 per 100k, which would be below average in the UK or France.

[explaininjs]

What an incredibly effective way of showcasing murder rate isn't everything - you couldn't pay me to live in Irvine.

[giantrobot]

But Irvine has The Spectrum (is it still open?) and... The Spectrum! A real cultural nexus.

[emodendroket]

Yes, the Spectrum is still open.

[emodendroket]

Others are paying a great deal for the privilege though.

[teacpde]

Curious what makes Irvine a bad place to live for you?

[explaininjs]

Takes the American "unwalkable city" trope to the extreme - you can't even really bike there. People live in isolate subdivisions (gated, often) connected to the outside world by mega-arterials with 6+ lanes.

It's not surprising it ranks so low in murders - it's hard to get killed when you're only outside for the time it takes to walk from your parking spot to the shop.

[Aeolun]

Apologies, since they seemed to pick an example based on desirability I assumed it was the best.

[eclipxe]

Zot!

[ActorNightly]

Birmingham UK has way higher numbers

https://www.bhamwiki.com/w/Birmingham_homicides_by_year

[roryirvine]

That wiki is about Birmingham in the US.

By comparison, there were 93 murders in 2022 in the West Midlands (the UK region encompassing Birmingham, UK). That's a rate of 1.56 per 100,000 population, which I agree is pretty bad - but it's almost 50x less than the equivalent for the US city.

(source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/288221/number-of-homicid...)

[Aeolun]

Holy shit, Birmingham sounds like a fun place to live. Guess it’s offset by how safe the rest of the UK is.

Of course you are now more likely to die from lack of medical care than a murder, so it may not matter too much.

[grogenaut]

I grew up in St Louis. We didn't worry so much about murder for cause as someone had to specifically dislike you (cheating on/with spouse for example). We just watched the street crime rates.

That said moving to the west coast people freak out all the time about yearly murder rates that are a weekend in STL.

[somenameforme]

A lot depends a lot on distribution, which surface level stats don't reveal. I've lived in very high crime rates that were perfectly safe because it was a mixture of 'don't go to these areas' and basic interpersonal stuff. I've also lived in areas that were far safer on paper, but were substantially more dangerous for me because crime was far more 'equal opportunity.' I've no idea of the situation in San Francisco but this could easily explain the perception : stats relationship.

[nverno]

Exactly, murder stats aren't necessarily a good measure of how safe a city feels to a typical dweller. Many city homicides are gang-related, and if the gangs only operate in specific areas, killing eachother, the city can still feel totally safe to other people. Constant theft really weighs on the psyche- needing to worry about everywhere you leave your bike locked or park your car is a burden.

To your point, Ulaanbaatar felt like one of the more dangerous cities I've been in because people would rob foreigners in broad daylight on crowded streets, but I don't think there was much homicide at all.

[projectazorian]

> Constant theft really weighs on the psyche- needing to worry about everywhere you leave your bike locked or park your car is a burden.

This was my experience living in Chicago. While violent crime was much higher than on the West Coast, it was highly localized and it remained true that if you didn’t go looking for trouble, it usually wouldn’t find you. There is affordable housing and the social safety net hasn’t completely collapsed so there are many fewer cases of out of control mentally ill folks on the streets.

Meanwhile, petty property crime felt like it was much lower. Car break-ins definitely happened but it was not at all endemic like it seems to be in LA or SF. Although I’ve heard this has changed if you own a Hyundai or Kia due to a security vulnerability in many of those cars permitting easy hot-wiring. The new security patches rolling out will fix that problem, I hope.

[nverno]

That's interesting about Chicago, that's one city where I imagined the murders would've had more of an effect.

It seems impossible that people don't even have to lock their bikes in a lot of Asian cities coming from the states.

[projectazorian]

There are several neighborhoods in Chicago with almost all the amenities of NYC/SF, low crime, but much lower cost of living. Although housing costs in those neighborhoods have gone up quite a bit as more and more remote workers figure this out.

(yes, it gets cold sometimes, but you can always take some of that money you saved by moving and get on a plane somewhere warm)

[version_five]

Per capita rates are often hard to compare (I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with any conclusions). I find the rates often have more with how boundaries are drawn and are especially inaccurate for smaller populations as a reflection of overall safety. There's probably an element of that in the St. Louis numbers.

I once saw a crime map of the boroughs in a city where I lived. It showed the downtown as way higher than others per-capita, but it's because few live there as it's mostly commercial, more than higher absolute numbers. Lots of effects like this skew the numbers.

[kemayo]

Yeah, Saint Louis is a weird case because it has a really tight boundary compared to most cities, so the crime numbers you see are all about the urban core and don't include data from the suburbs.

This NYT article has some numbers comparing "metro areas" rather than cities, and it knocks Saint Louis down a few slots (while still leaving it amongst the worst in the nation, for sure): https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/upshot/crime-statistics-s...

[brabel]

Sweden is in the middle of a gang crisis with people murdered every week... still, the murder rate over the last several years has always been below 1.23 (the highest value, in 2020).

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SWE/sweden/murder-homi...

According to this[1], Sweden had 116 murders in 2022, less than the peak in 2020, which was 124. Basic maths tells me that' around 1.104 murders per 100K people (current population is 10.5 million).

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/533917/sweden-number-of-...

Puts thing into perspective.

[projectazorian]

Also worth noting that SF contains most of the Bay Area’s high-crime areas, yet the city limits are much smaller than those of most major American cities. So that skews the crime rate upwards. There’s a similar dynamic at play with several other American cities.

[fintechjock]

If the argument is that SF is high crime because of policy decisions, then the line drawing doesn’t matter

[projectazorian]

The line drawing was a policy decision, and it makes regional level policymaking near impossible, creating adverse incentives for suburban jurisdictions and constraining the options of local policymakers in SF. It’s the cause of many of the Bay Area’s current social woes.

[skyyler]

https://www.kxan.com/investigations/homicides-on-the-rise-ho...

https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-crime-rate-bob-lee-sf-vio...

2021 numbers put Austin slightly ahead of SF.

[y-curious]

Ok but I wish we could have a database where we DON'T count gangbangers killing other gangbangers. Would probably be much closer.

[kevstev]

From what I understand, rural rates of violence are much higher than cities per capita: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/gun-violence-in-rur...

The list of counties with the highest rates of violence listed on that article are all southern and rural and not known to be associated with gang activity that I am aware of.