[AndyNemmity]

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.

[kurikuri]

“Absolute level of safety” what does this even mean? Per capita crime rates seem quite relevant to this underlying property and can be well defined.

[hyperadvanced]

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.

[watwut]

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.

[reducesuffering]

Who your partner and friends are can very much be influenced by your location. Your own safety is in some ways influenced by the overall people around you, not just stats on random killings.

[wolverine876]

> a bigger scale freaks people out even if the coefficients are the same.

It freaks out people who live elsewhere and all they know of cities is what they see on cable news, especially a certain channel.

> There’s a psychological reason (rational or not) people equate cities with violence

Maybe it's simply that it's repeated at them endlessly - a simple, effective tactic used by conservatives for decades.

[mlrtime]

You post on /r/nyc don't you?

I lived in NYC for 20 years, people who live there too long develop stockholm syndrome excusing the shit that goes on on a daily basis. Every new yorker experiences it given enough time.

The common saying is that when a 'transplant' moves and starts questioning the filfth, noise, qol issues and minor crime they are told to go back to Ohio.

I used to be that person , then I realized that living in an environment where you excuse this behavior as normal... is not normal.

So you can spread your message of "statistically safe" as much as you want but everyone knows that new yorkers put up with a different amount of s*t than most.

[wolverine876]

Why do all the arguments for NY being dangerous, etc. lack an objective basis (except one person's)? I think it's because it's fabricated.

Lots of NYers love living there, obviously - they are willing to pay far more for the privilege (another objective fact). You dismissing their preferences is just one person's baseless speculation.

[hyperadvanced]

Oh sure. I’m just locating that fear that media outlets abuse in the “absolute violence” metric that the commenter above mentioned

[satvikpendem]

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.

[wolverine876]

As I said elsewhere, people in cities know that having more people around is safer. Deserted alleys are more dangerous than busy streets.

[outop]

One of the worst and most tendentious numerical arguments I have ever seen.

[wolverine876]

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).

[reducesuffering]

> 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.

[AndyNemmity]

NYC hasn't had as little as 240 murders in a year since murder data was recorded.

[reducesuffering]

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.

[AndyNemmity]

Apologies, I wasn't aware you were making up numbers. That isn't useful, or helpful in conversation in my opinion, but clearly you feel strongly that's a reasonable thing to do.

I contend it is significantly safer in the majority of cities in the US than New York City.

[mgce]

Like everyone else here I'm having trouble parsing what you're trying to say.

You seem to be implying per capita is a bad measure of safety. But you're not being clear why. Can you elaborate?

[reducesuffering]

I didn't realize you need the exact #'s to understand an argument. Now that I've provided NYC's, and Stockton's is 34 in 2019, does it make any difference? No.

Your conclusion is without any evidence and is in fact, wrong, based on the crime metrics we can easily compare.

It's quite uncanny that it's the people who most fear crime, think they're going to something like "stay the hell away from crime infested NYC" and proceed to move somewhere where they're more likely to be affected by crime.

[kortilla]

Affected and “victim of” are different. Higher population densities mean more people are affected by a murder (more witnesses, more people disrupted by the crime scene, more people that go ‘I go to that train stop every day, that could have been me’).

Rational or not, proximity of crime freaks some people out much more than probability of being the victim.

[Nimitz14]

His argument remains valid with the correct number, proving that his made up number was close enough.

You're factually wrong.