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by hyperadvanced 768 days ago
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.
2 comments
watwut 767 days ago
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.

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reducesuffering 767 days ago
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.
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wolverine876 767 days ago
> 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.

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mlrtime 765 days ago
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.

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wolverine876 764 days ago
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.

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hyperadvanced 766 days ago
Oh sure. I’m just locating that fear that media outlets abuse in the “absolute violence” metric that the commenter above mentioned
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