That is now. NYC was famously crime ridden for at least a century. Today, just as in London, crime past a certain value or a non injury car accident, is not investigated.
> NYC was famously crime ridden for at least a century.
Where does that come from? All of the US had high crime rates from ~1970s to 2000 (as a rough guess). NYC doesn't stand out, afaik; some other cities had higher crime rates.
> Today, just as in London, crime past a certain value or a non injury car accident, is not investigated.
What makes you say that has changed from the past?
Are assaults low? Petty theft? What about pedestrian sentiment when walking the street? Not all crime is reported and not all threats are crimes yet threats will certainly cause someone to feel unsafe.
You can look up the answers to some of the questions. Do you have any factual basis for your claims?
> Not all crime is reported and not all threats are crimes yet threats will certainly cause someone to feel unsafe.
What does that mean? We don't know anything about anything? Then maybe crime is even lower than I think. Everyone feels threatened all the time? What basis do you have for saying that crime is _____ (what?)? It's all fabricated so far.
here you go. Unfortunately city agencies seems very good at not tracking and making this info very public. So you have to go find it from 3rd party nonprofits
The relevant bits:
>>>Only 37 percent rate public safety in their neighborhood as excellent or good, down from 50 % in 2017 [1] (yikes!)
>>> In fact, New Yorkers feel only marginally safer riding the subway during the DAY now as they felt on the subway at NIGHT in 2017 [1]
In fact, this source confirms my entire premise, that while murder has been down vs the horrendous stats of 20 years ago, nonmurder felonies and other crimes have spiked only recently. These 2 now EXCEED the stats of horrendous stats of 20 years ago. [2]
The problem is it’s hard to get anything other than anecdata when discussing things that don’t come into macro statistics. I live in a large Democrat-dominated city, I have very deep connections and roots all around, and casual mentions of petty crime are common. I have observed a lot of shoplifting and I’m only in retail stores so often. There is certainly an attitude that some types of crime just occur and no one will stop it.
> In its annual survey, BJS asks crime victims whether they reported their crime to police. It found that in 2022, only 41.5% of violent crimes and 31.8% of household property crimes were reported to authorities. BJS notes that there are many reasons why crime might not be reported, including fear of reprisal or of “getting the offender in trouble,” a feeling that police “would not or could not do anything to help,” or a belief that the crime is “a personal issue or too trivial to report.”
> Most of the crimes that are reported to police, meanwhile, are not solved, at least based on an FBI measure known as the clearance rate. That’s the share of cases each year that are closed, or “cleared,” through the arrest, charging and referral of a suspect for prosecution, or due to “exceptional” circumstances such as the death of a suspect or a victim’s refusal to cooperate with a prosecution. In 2022, police nationwide cleared 36.7% of violent crimes that were reported to them and 12.1% of the property crimes that came to their attention.
You still don't have any data supporting your claims that crime is high. All you say is that it's not always reported - which is well known and has been for generations, if not forever.
What shows that it's high? It's circular to say that the unknown numbers are higher, not lower, because you think crime is high.
> a large Democrat-dominated city
What does the political party have to do with it, unless this really is about your politics? Republican areas of the country have higher crime rates, last I checked. If you think there's a correlation between party and crime rate, feel free to show us.
> (Pew data)
It's great to have some data, thanks. I don't know that anything has changed, however, though I imagine numbers were different during the pandemic and immediately after.
You have actual data - why kill your argument by exaggerating it?
The stats you posted are about perception, not actual events. If people read other people constantly badgering them about safety, of course they will worry about it.
When you say "shoplifting," do you mean someone has simply walked/run out of the store without paying for something? If so, I don't really understand what that has to do with safety. Same with plenty of other crimes, such as someone jumping a subway turnstile, graffiti, etc. These things surely lead to a lower quality of life and I'd prefer that they didn't happen, but I personally wouldn't say that they make a city dangerous.
This is controversial. Some studies have found that petty crime like this leads to more crime. Or stated differently if you solve these little crimes there is less big crime as well. However this is very controversial and those studies have been criticized - I am not able to figure out the truth here, feel free to do your own research.
A policing tactic back in the 1990s was 'Broken Windows', which did what you said - fix the little stuff and the big issues will improve. It was controversial, as you say, because at least in some places the strategy became 'oppress black and brown males' so the white people can feel safe.
I've read one news story on an analysis of Broken Windows (so not a lot of data) said that outcomes were not correlated with that strategy. Crime went down everywhere, whether or not they used Broken Windows.
Mayors and police chiefs, etc. are called geniuses or fools in strong correlation with national trends, especially the economy. Lots of 1990s mayors, etc. were geniuses as the economy boomed and crime came down nationwide.
Focusing the discussion around "safety" doesn't make sense to me. It's just as reasonable to focus around "order" or "lawfulness" or "cleanliness" or anything else.
I never felt unsafe in LA, but I sure as hell felt disgusted when someone spit on us, and a bunch of other negative emotions when you saw the worst of the homeless population or drug use or anything else.
Was I unsafe ? No, but was it clearly disorderly? Yep.
> What about pedestrian sentiment when walking the street?
In other words: people who are not from New York come to the city. They falsely believe it to be a dangerous place compared to where they're from. They walk around fearfully, unable to escape their mindset. Now they would like this fear they experienced to be reflected in crime statistics.
Saying NYC being one of the safest places to be in the country is why LLMs will never be accurate. People will just say anything no matter how irrational it is.
Want to back that up with some data? NYC is half the per capita murder rate of the US. What swath of places do you think are safer such that "one of the safest places" for NYC is inaccurate? On >250k population list, NYC is #20/100 safest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
On a 100k to 250k list, NYC is above average safety.
This is a problem that everyone who has lived in the developed world knows very well.
As the police is able to solve less and less crimes, and less criminals are convicted, people stop thinking it is worth their time to report every crime.
As less persecutions end up in convictions, and as accusations of bias can mean the end of a police officer career, there's also a more lax attitude from the police force.
Crime becomes less risky and more rewarding, what drives crime force recruitment up, the culture becomes more and more accepting, and petty criminals over time graduate to more serious crimes. Substance abuse, violence, it all just adds to the culture.
Soon you'll start noticing that there areas of the city where police presence is virtually inexistent, and the people who live on those places realize that involving the police could bring unpleasant consequences. Those liberated areas are for all practical purposes, outside the reach of the State.
Soon, murders start going unnoticed, fights against rival gangs lead to deaths, but unless the bodies are found, nobody is going to involve the police. People simply cease to exist and disappear, no records.
Politicians, prosecutors and police chiefs soon realize the political advantage of not digging too much into reality and promoting the lie that the official statistics, utterly corrupted by the incomplete data collection, are trustworthy and represent the reality.
Terminally political people and journalists, that are nowadays basically propaganda officers, start gaslighting everyone that dares to say otherwise. You can't feel safe in the subway, but you are either crazy or a simpleton if you don't believe NYC is one of the safest places in the world, look at the data!
If you want to throw out the data because it doesn’t suit your bias, fine, ultimately it’s your safety on the line based on your decision, so you better hope you’re correctly evaluating.
But I also think it’s odd that you think NYC is underreporting murders and not going after serious crimes, when if you go into rural areas, you’ll find many that are a few Sheriffs stretched thin over hundreds of miles, and infinite more potential for “murders going unnoticed.”
Lol man. I live now in northern Europe. You can show me any stupid number you want, I am not an idiot. I know NYC, it is a fucking hell hole.
Averages, per-capita, even if we could trust the data, and we definitely can't because NY government is a cesspool of corruption means absolutely nothing, because every one who lives in the real world knows that violence is not uniformly distributed. You can lie to yourself as much as you want, it is your choice, but I've seen this movie before, that's how things start, and them there's a moment when even people like you can't deny it anymore, but it will only get there exactly because of folks like you that prefer to live in the bizarre illusion that being a member of your ideological bubble makes you a high status person.
People like you make me remember the old soviet joke when they get astounded with the faith Americans had in their media, because the soviets at least were able to recognize propaganda for what it is.
Poor psychoanalyzing since I’m more often surrounded by the types who would knee jerk agree with you. I’m more likely (and do) to get shit on for dare questioning how truly awful big cities are, so I’d love some of that “high status” you think I’m feeling. Still, I’d rather poke hills in peoples’ poor kneejerk understanding of the world with investigating what the data tells us is actually going on, regardless of whether the opinion is popular. And it’s not, evidenced by the many people here, even on a more urban intellectual environment.
> This is a problem that everyone who has lived in the developed world knows very well. As the police is able to solve less and less crimes, and less criminals are convicted, people stop thinking it is worth their time to report every crime.
'Everyone knows' is a group of people repeating something to each other enough that they believe it must be true. Those are the things that most need skepticism, an objective factual basis. Look at your comment - there is no factual basis for any of the claims. Some is conspiracy - if they disagree, they are gaslighting, incompetent, etc.
Objective facts are our only salvation from our own delusions - which we're all subject to. There is factual basis to say that NYC is very safe, but it's not conclusive. That doesn't support baseless claims. If you have an alternative claim, there's not reason to believe it without factual support.
Almost everyone you're talking to here lives in the developed world, and it doesn't seem like they 'know' the same thing.
The statement that "NYC is one of the safest places in the country" and the relevance of per capita crime rates are two different discussions. When we say a place is "the safest," we're referring to the absolute level of safety.
Per capita crime rates, while useful for comparing the likelihood of crime between areas with different population sizes, don't determine the absolute safety of a place. They normalize crime data by population to show relative safety, which is a different metric.
There’s a psychological reason (rational or not) people equate cities with violence, and it’s this same “absolute level of safety”. When you could live in a town of 5000 where 1 person gets murdered every year, it’s very different than scaling those numbers up by 1,000. Realistically, 999 of those murders will be of/by people you will barely interact with, whereas in a small town, it’s all but guaranteed that you will know both the murderer and the victim (and they will know each other).
That said, I understand the desire to frame crime in the absolute. Either you’re the 1 guy who gets unlucky and experiences a crime in your small town, or there are 999 people like you in the big city). Crime is a problem of scale, and a bigger scale freaks people out even if the coefficients are the same.
It is not just the scale issue. It is also that for your personal safety, only statistics on killings of random strangers matters.
Majority of murders are among people who know each other. You personal risk is all about who your partner is, who your friends are, how much aggressive your uncle is. A guy you never met that is just about to murder his wife has nothing to do with your personal risk.
By that logic, somewhere with no people would be the safest area. Good factoid to know but for most people, it's not useful to live with no others around.
As any person who lives in a city knows, more people means more safety. It's the empty, dark street - especially non-residential - that you want to avoid. Also, the NYPD is always nearby if that suits you (I've never needed them personally).
> When we say a place is "the safest," we're referring to the absolute level of safety.
Idk who you think "we" is. It's not in my definition of safety, nor probably the general populace to think of Stockton, California as "safer" than NYC, just because Stockton had 50 murders a year compared to NYC's 240... Because Stockton has a 17.77 murder rate per 100k, and NYC 3 per 100k. You bet your ass you'd be "safer", as in less likely to get shot or stabbed to death, living in NYC.
My argument is clear about how ridiculous absolute values of crime pertain to how safe it is for someone. That you instead want to nitpick the exact # of murders in NYC (when I just winged a 3 per 100k at 8m population) is indicative that you can't refute it and your original assertion is incorrect.
If anything, the real # in 2023 of 386 only further proves my point. That it's ridiculous to assert even that many more murders is less safe than Stockton, CA.
Safety is about "am I more or less likely to have something happen to me" and no one is thinking that means moving to the tiniest country of 2,000 people where only 10 murders happened in the entire country last year.
Thats not how statistics work. The average number of crimes per person is going to be the same so the crime per capita is the same as the amount of crime an person should expect to experience on average.
You may be thinking of a median or mode, which can differ based on the shape of the distribution curve.
Sorry but moving the goalpost from “one of the safest places to be in the country” to “one of the safest big cities in the country” is not fair game. The US has over 19,000 cities and you discarded all but 91 of them.
I've not discarded them, it's just the the largest portion of data for where people in the US are, which NYC has an objectively good per capita murder rate compared to where most people live in the US. If we want to get data for the US as a whole, please point me in the direction where we can find the safety level of the median person, besides NYC having a 3.3 murder per capita rate while the US is ~6.5. Idk what % it is, but a large portion of Americans live in those lists of 100k+ cities.
When you have so many people per square mile, it slightly skews the metrics. The reality might be you're less likely to be murdered, but you might be way more likely to witness a crime. That matters.
> you might be way more likely to witness a crime. That matters.
People are just reaching for possible straws. Do you have any factual basis to say that? We can make up anything and put the word 'might' or 'maybe' in front of them.
I've spent lots of time in NYC and other dense, major cities, and I think I've seen one crime ($20 stolen). The interstate highway is more threatening, with the aggressive drivers.
Really, go to NYC. Look at the millions of people walking around without a care, going about their days.
I think it's gotten polarized enough around here that it's not going to be helpful to defend my statement, but here goes: I was just saying something that must surely be true... If you measure crime by the person, in a dense place you're more likely to be near a crime when it happens than a place with more crime per person, but much less people per space.
To me, this sounds like the rate of unreported crimes would be lower in dense areas, making them even safer than they appear in the statistics.
You are correct that if the average number of observers per crime is higher, that could indeed make a place feel comparatively more dangerous since the while the liklihood of being a victim is lower, the liklihood of seeing a victim is higher. However, I would posit that a lot more goes into feelings of safety and we haven't seen any data on how large this effect size might be.
> If you measure crime by the person, in a dense place you're more likely to be near a crime when it happens than a place with more crime per person, but much less people per space.
Yes, agreed (of course). I'm not sure what that says about the original statement.
> The reality might be you're less likely to be murdered, but you might be way more likely to witness a crime. That matters.
First, it seems like we are really shifting the goalposts. Being victimized by crime is a lot different than witnessing it, though the latter isn't pleasant, of course.
How much does it matter? In a place that dense, you see a lot more of everything. For people there, it's a feature and not a bug. That's why people pay so much to live there.
Is witnessing a crime so bad? I suppose something traumatizing would be, but I think NYers are used to seeing 'everything, all the time', and they would not be traumatized by most crime. Murder? I think that would leave a mark, depending on what you saw, but that's very rare. Shoplifting? Public intoxication? A carjacking would be alarming, I suppose, speaking for myself.
I gotta say this subthread is weird, our society has pretty much decided to evaluate such issues as safety, worker happiness, gender equality and so forth on the basis of statistics, and all these people here are just saying no, it doesn't matter that statistically New York is safer without providing any argument why the statistics are wrong (there are a couple people who say things like the population size skews statistics but that's like the premise of an argument, not an actual argument), according to these folks it just is the case that New York is much less safe and that's it buddy!
I would expect to see a mathematical argument as to why the statistics are wrong, size of population skews the statistics, cool. How does that work and why has it made New York seem safer when you contend it isn't!?
There are different kinds of crime than murder - ok, show the stats as to why people suffer more from other crime in New York than the rest of the country!
You're more likely to see a crime in New York than in other places with more crime because there are more people, ok sounds like a cool statistical "paradox", show your work. This is HN and all that stuff!
I mean it is just a weird little discussion here, reminds me of twitter, although with more text and admittedly more grammatical correctness.
And while subjective experience is important, it’s hard to argue with a position someone didn’t logic themselves into.
I live in Chicago and it’s much the same. I hear about carjackings and muggings and all sorts yet the one thing I see and experience nearly every single time I leave the house is being nearly run over by some impatient wanker in a car. I don’t feel that other stuff because I yanked the IV drip of fear-news-weather garbage media out of my arm and that’s really the only thing feeding this crap to people.
Most big cities are the safest they have been in history. Someone wants people to feel otherwise. I wonder why.
What is that based on? Is there a survey? When I've been in NYC, people seem to feel very safe and relaxed, 24/7 (of course, in the city that never sleeps).
I suppose it is on one hand based on media, NYC is the big bad city, it's the mafia city, if you have a crime based movie it will be in NY, LA, or maybe Chicago as the most popular places.
Another thing might be that it feels unsafe due to social isolation maybe, for people who are actually there, but that is just a supposition.
I think it's reasonable that they feel it's less safe. I often feel things that I know do not exactly correspond to statistical reality, one should just try to be aware of where the feelings slightly diverge and not go arguing that what one feels is objective reality.
It's kind of a running joke here in NYC how we'll watch some movie depicting the city as a dystopian wasteland, then we walk outside into tree-lined streets, coffee shops, overflowing sidewalk cafes, and people generally living and enjoying their lives.
That image is incredibly outdated and has become an increasingly tired cliche.
This applies equally to the outer boroughs. Poorer neighborhoods (in any borough) are scrappier, of course, than the rich areas. But they're just as full of life and vibrancy.
I really take your point on the media projection. It's relentless. And it really keeps an outdated image alive, especially in the minds of people who don't live here and can't directly contrast with their own eyes.
> That image is incredibly outdated and has become an increasingly tired cliche.
I agree, but I'm not that old and that's the image of New York City I grew up with because it was then true.
It takes more than a generation to overcome that kind of impression. I'm pretty confident that if you asked New Yorkers my parents' age what the South is like you'd get a lot of answers that were unpleasantly accurate in 1965. This is particularly true when a lot of political polarization is based on region and urbanization.
Most crime is marginal even inside cities "infested" with crime. If you are personally affected (statistically improbable), the city/place is already unlivable and it'll go down quickly like some places in South America.
I think there is an important distinction to make here. Crime is unlikely to affect most people, but that doesn't mean that an increase should be tolerated. In fact, it should be alerting to the people and authorities to reverse course as much as possible.
Of course that doesn't mean that NYC is unsafe to visit. It's reasonably safe. Bogota is also not unsafe to visit. It's kinda safe though and requires extra precautions.
> Someone wants people to feel otherwise. I wonder why.
There is an ongoing campaign to show Western cities as collapsing/decaying. There is also another ongoing campaign to show that China is collapsing any minute now. Welcome to the new cold war.
> There is an ongoing campaign to show Western cities as collapsing/decaying. There is also another ongoing campaign to show that China is collapsing any minute now. Welcome to the new cold war.
The campaign about Western cities is not from China, but from Western conservatives. Look at Trump and the GOP (and now the Democrat governor of NY!) repeatedly calling for the national guard or military to be sent into cities.
The problem with numbers as they are only as good as the source numbers and questions you ask..
If you don't collect some numbers that skews your data away from the truth. If you collect false numbers (many ways to do that) it also skews your data. If you collect numbers but then exclude them in some way that skews results. Thus the first question needs do be do we even have correct valid numbers to work with. If the source data is wrong in anyway then no amount of statistics can correct for that (statistics can correct for sample bias in some situations, but that is different from completely missing or intentionally wrong data by someone who knows how to fool that correction).
Once we have accurate data, then there are a lot of ways to lie with statistics. Is shoplifting a "serious crime" - different people will have different answers. There are many ways to slice up the data we have and if you want to get any particular result you will slice in many different ways until you find a result you like and then work the questions backward to make it seem like they were correct. I'm sure someone better trained in statistics can come up with other ways to make the data show whatever they want.
One solution to this is to collect three different kinds of statistics.
One set is reported (to the police) crime. This is fairly concrete but is affected by people, for example, deciding not to report petty theft because they don't believe it will be investigated.
The second set is a survey of personal victimhood. The British Crime Survey, for example, gets a representative sample of the population and asks questions like "Did you get burgled last year?". This is a smaller (so less sensitive) dataset than the first and misses crime without an individual victim, but has far fewer misincentive problems.
The third is surveys perceptions of crime, either personal or geographical. This is a much weaker measure for actual crime, but captures how people are feeling, and is useful for understanding whether, for example, people are afraid of certain places because of perceived criminality.
The first two correlate reasonably well, though not perfectly. My understanding is that the third is much more weakly associated, has a fairly lengthy time lag between crime changing and perceptions changing, and is affected by changes in political and news attention. Plus, in general, humans are not good at guessing about things they don't have experience of. You can do a similar exercise looking at people's perception of average incomes and they're way out.
It is NOW. You missed out when NYC almost went bankrupt in the 1970's and was a hellscape through the 1980's... They did a great job bringing it back from the brink, but it was very very bad.
Of course there is, however murder is the best simple proxy because it's the most severe and least likely to be disputed that it's fudged. So it stands in well for quick internet comments. When you get into a multi-pronged analysis of 5+ crime metrics, and how you factor each into "safety" and what metric and places go more underreported, etc. well, you have yourself a research paper...
You're going to need to elaborate beyond "let's say". What you wrote is basically just a conspiracy theory. In fact crime statistics reporting is an extremely mature field with well-understood methods and comparable data, and nothing one particular administration can do it really going to impact things very much. Basically, if this was such a great trick for Adams to have invented, why didn't it occur to Bloomberg or Giuliani or Koch?
In fact NYC is a very safe city. That it's inconvenient for you to believe that doesn't change the facts.
Your citation for an "understood phenomenon" is a position paper from a lobby group. That's the point: the facts don't match the policy you want, so in our post-reality world the job of lobbyists is to invent arguments to allow people to ignore facts. As folks elsewhere in the thread point out: murder rates don't work with this analysis (you can't "underreport" a body) and murder rates show the same effects.
Is it so hard to believe that your political aliance is just wrong on this? Would it really be such a terrible thing if, y'know, US cities were safe?
Here is another source [1] that draws the conclusion that "approximately half of crimes are not reported to the police".
Here is yet another source from the U.S. Department of Justice [2]: "During the period from 2006 to 2010, 52% of all violent victimizations, or an annual average of 3,382,200 violent victimizations, were not reported to the police.".
Realistically speaking it is hard to measure unreported crimes given that by definition they are - after all - unreported. And yet the fact that some data is not collected or it is hard to collect, doesn't mean that the data doesn't exist.
> Is it so hard to believe that your political aliance is just wrong on this?
I could be asking you the same question, based on your stance.
What if there was some place with no crime? No wait, then they would discourage it because there would be no need to fund the police and what the hell does the Mayor do all day.
If it was a large enough city, you could convincingly argue that there being no crime means crime prevention is massively overfunded and/or excessive in nature.
Combine that the culture of not snitching, and you get wildly bad crime data, fueling all sorts of silly internet arguments, bad politics and bad social science.
That is now. NYC was famously crime ridden for at least a century. Today, just as in London, crime past a certain value or a non injury car accident, is not investigated.