[smsm42]

If by "everywhere" you mean "major megapolises with crime problems", then yes, everywhere. Otherwise, no, not everywhere, and yes, in a suburban location a chance of a shooting happening under your very office window is extremely low. Living/working in a megapolis has its advantages, but let's not paint over its downsides also. Criminals want the same advantages too.

[MSFT_Edging]

Cities tend to have a lower per-capita crime rate, it's just dense and visible.

This is just suburban paranoia. Crime happens.

[spiderice]

According to who? Do you have a source?

Top violent crime rate per capita US cities [1]:

1. St. Louis 2. Detroit 3. Baltimore 4. Memphis 5. Kansas City

If we include all crime and not just violent crime, it’s still all large cities at the top. Not sure where you’re getting your info.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...

[warkdarrior]

That list is of the 100 most populous cities in US, so by definition it does not include mid/small cities, towns, and villages.

[MSFT_Edging]

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

Per capita, smaller cities are outstanding in their crime.

Even Baltimore is down in 51st place.

This list is incomplete to boot. Large cities often called "war zone" by culture war fighters are largely safer than being in a small town.

[91bananas]

St. Louis is sketchy AF but it's hardly a large city, relative to actual large cities.

[Sohcahtoa82]

I think it's reasonable to measure crime in terms of crimes per area, rather than crimes per capita, especially when comparing suburban to urban.

[etchalon]

I don't see how that's reasonable. What I'm interested in is how likely crime is to happen to me, personally, not how likely any given crime will happen in some radius to me.

[Sohcahtoa82]

You really don't see how that's reasonable?

People want to feel safe. Having high crime nearby makes people feel unsafe, even if it's just drug dealers and gangs beefing with each other that likely don't care about you.

[etchalon]

By that logic, it would be reasonable for the government to outlaw the reporting of crime, as people would "feel" safer.

[FredPret]

That's the worst possible interpretation of what that comment said.

- If there's a shooting 100ft from me, I don't care if it gets reported or not. I'm worried about getting in the crossfire.

- On the other hand, if there's a shooting 10 miles from me, I'm safe.

So it's perfectly logical to want to live in the second situation and avoid the first. Per-capita statistics mask the effects of the first and make the second look worse.

The best thing to do is to use per-capita stats when judging your likelihood of being a victim, and per-area stats when judging your likelihood of being near a crime.

Most people want to minimize both, and you shitting on them for it is bizarre.

[smsm42]

It is reasonable. Many totalitarian governments hide crime statistics. Many badly run police forces discourage reporting certain types of crime, like theft or robbery, to not mess up their stats. Of course, at some crime level, the difference between the official picture and the reality becomes impossible to hide, but the pretense usually lasts much longer even if it's obvious how hollow it is. But yes, it is very rational for the government whose interests are detached from the interests of the citizens, to manipulate the data, and they frequently do.

[toast0]

There's no need to outlaw reporting crime. You simply don't do anything with reports and the problem solves itself. Shootings tend to still get reported, but there's little point to reporting less serious crime once it's established that no action is taken. To that end, crime statistics are pretty hard to use in a meaningful way.

[spiderice]

Ridiculous take. And not only because people obviously wouldn’t feel safer if reporting crimes was illegal.

[bcrosby95]

Crime per area makes it more likely you are an accidental victim of a crime. You know, if the drug dealer missed.

Also, much of crime is not just random. So there is some logic in placing more value into not witnessing crime (especially one where someone is shot) while theoretically in a vacuum having a higher chance of being a target of a crime.

[crazygringo]

Accidental victims are already included in the "per capita". If a drug dealer accidentally shoots someone, that is a crime and goes into the crime statistics.

So statistically, by definition, crime per capita is all that matters. If there is lower crime per capita in a dense city, that's already accounting for accidents like stray bullets too.

If you don't want to be a victim of crime, then you want to live where crime is lowest per-capita. Period.

Not where it is lowest per square mile.

[etchalon]

"There's only 1 crime per square mile!"

"...but there's only 1 person per square mile too."

I feel like this whole "per capita doesn't matter!" parade is a recent invention of some specific corner of the internet that feels frustrated the data keeps disagreeing with what they think reality is.

[scarmig]

What doesn't go into statistics is

1) the negative externalities of being near crime. Suppose you live in a densely populated enough area that you can expect a person to be murdered within 1km of you every year. There's another area, with an identical crime rate but a much more sparsely populated population such that you'd expect a person to be murdered within 10km of you every year. Most people would much prefer the latter.

2) How people adjust their behavior (to avoid the externalities and risk of being an accidental victim). There are places in SF I simply won't step foot in or even drive through after 10pm or so. That's a cost being absorbed by people; if they didn't do so, there would be more additional accidental murders.

[aqme28]

> Crime per area makes it more likely you are an accidental victim of a crime

Strange take. The opposite is true. Crime per area has nothing to say about how likely you are to be the victim of a crime, while crime per capita literally does say how likely you are to be a victim of a crime.

[smsm42]

No it does not literally say that. It would if the crime were be allocated by a random uniform lottery to every person living in the city. That's not how the crime works.

[watwut]

No, crimes per capita express how likely you are to be that accidental victim.

[willmadden]

No, it's not just suburban paranoia. Travel to Tokyo or Singapore and then to S.F.

[MSFT_Edging]

Spent a week walking around SF and saw no crime. It felt extremely safe.

Big tech made SF unaffordable and then loves to complain about the poverty left in it's wake. I don't care if tech workers feel uncomfortable in SF.

SF was rapidly gentrified to the point of mass homelessness, now they want to legislate a way to remove the homeless people that were made impoverished. I will never care/empathize with a hackernews poster complaining about crime in the Bay Area. You moved there, you demanded luxury, you demanded space for the luxury, you pushed the existing population out.

[FredPret]

We recently spent a month in Tokyo. It is ridiculously safe and law-abiding. I'm surprised they have any crime at all. In our entire time there, I saw one (1) individual piece of small rubbish on the street.

[sneak]

Tokyo is not safe. People who are arrested for suspicion of crimes are held for weeks by the police and threatened and beaten and tortured until they confess, even if they are innocent. The police then release them for 24 hours and rearrest them on a different charge so the two month holding timer resets.

People there have been held for months in solitary confinement (torture past a few days, per the UN) awaiting trial only to be found innocent and released.

As a foreigner, good luck if a Japanese person calls the police on you and accuses you of something. You’re looking at 40+ days of beatings and torture as the police will of course believe natives over tourists.

[rangestransform]

well that just shows that to japanese people, even kangaroo courts are better than crime

[aqme28]

You're right of course, but it's sort of meaningless. I live in Germany where there isn't nearly as much gun crime, but Musk isn't about to move Twitter to Germany.

[willmadden]

Don't your police regularly jail people for non-violent speech? I don't see Musk moving to Germany.

[jeromegv]

They jail people for antisemitic and nazi speech, if for you this is "non-violent", I have a history lesson on 1939-1945 to show you.

[willmadden]

I saw a video of a German activist being hauled off by the police for giving a seminar about censorship the other day. Your country controls speech through force. Like I said, it's highly unlikely Musk would move anything to your country.

[thomasz]

You certainly did not see an activist hauled off by the police for giving a seminar about censorship the other day.

[lukan]

So ... can you link that outrageous video, that we can judge whether it really was the way you said it was?

[warkdarrior]

> it's highly unlikely Musk would move anything to your country

And yet Musk proves you wrong: https://www.tesla.com/giga-berlin

[willmadden]

Tesla does not operate a social media platform.

[peterfirefly]

Marie-Thérèse Kaiser. Apparently it is illegal to state that more Afghan refugees in Germany lead to more rapes in Germany.

https://freespeechunion.org/young-afd-politician-convicted-f...

Björn Höcke. Apparently the slogan "Alles für Deutschland" (Everything for Germany) is strictly verboten because a Nazi organization used it. I didn't know that before the Höcke verdict and I doubt most Germans did. I also very much doubt that it was in any way used as a Nazi reference.

Germany's penal code does ban certain non-specified symbols -- which makes a lot sense based on Germany's recent history. Unfortunately, the law is applied extremely selectively and in quite creative ways for opinions that some people just don't like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a

Why does Germany pretend Die Linke (The Left -- the renamed East German Communist Party) is a perfectly normal and legal party and at the same time that the perfectly normal and legal (and not very much on the right) party AfD is quasi-Nazi?

[TurboTveit]

If by non-violent speech you mean roman salutes or nazi quotes, yes.

[rightbyte]

It is more or less enough to in public say why you don't support Likud nowadays to be arrested in Germany.