It's an important truth that walking a mile in a high population density area puts you at a higher crime risk than walking a mile in a medium or low population density area.
It's the opposite - right? There are more gross crimes in the high-density area, but your chance of suffering one is much lower (all else being equal). Trying to apply statistics directly like this is generally inaccurate, but to the degree the numbers say anything it's the opposite of what you say.
Fair point, it's more complicated than I originally thought.
Density increases the number of potential criminals you pass but also increases the number of alternative victims they could target.
If you're a uniquely attractive/visibly wealthy personal walking home from a night out then the risk of passing more criminals dominates the advantage of alterative targets. After all, there's nothing really competing with you.
However, if you look like normal person but happen to have a million dollar watch in your pocket then you're conceivably safer in a city. Because there'd be so many alternative victims who may be more attractive targets than you. Compared to the countryside robber who only gets a single target per night.
There's also a lot of evidence that a given individuals' chance of being the victim of a particular crime derives from their social situation. Most people who regularly do crime are used to doing crime in a way they can repeat, and those crimes most often target locals and people from the same social sphere. There are also plenty of factors that lead to the targeting of tourists or wealthy people, but most crime victims are poor and live in similar conditions to the person committing a crime against them.
Obviously this isn't every crime! People do have unlikely crimes happen to them all the time! Just that they're statistical anomalies and the population level statistics will mislead you about how high your risk is.
Not necessarily, as high population density generally means lots of police and lots of cameras (both security cameras and individuals with smartphones)
> Not really, since your chance of being a victim is divided by the number of people in the area.
Depends on behavior. If I stay in my room all day, I don't contribute to your divisor. If Jack Dorsey doesn't walk around alone past midnight, he's not absorbing the same risk quotient either.
> If Jack Dorsey doesn't walk around alone past midnight, he's not absorbing the same risk quotient either.
Jack Dorsey is a weird motherfucker and a real outlier for this example. He used to walk to the Twitter office every day and generally looks and dresses like someone well outside his economic strata. I would not be surprised to find “midnight solo perambulations through the tenderloin” among his hobbies.