[vundercind]

There's an ongoing "all the big liberal cities are scary" vibe in much media that's been internalized by a large proportion of the population.

I know multiple people (and have myself experienced this) who've been greeted with warnings and concern from relatives when traveling to major cities... when those cities have violent crime rates far lower than the places they/we live. Like, a fifth as much or lower. It's still "common knowledge" that e.g. Manhattan is way more dangerous than a "safe" red state suburban/exurban county (LOL, very not necessarily true) and that the largest cities must be way more dangerous than small and mid-sized cities (also very not necessarily true).

[busterarm]

As someone who lived in NYC all the way from the early 80s up until 2 years ago and still has to travel there regularly for business, NYC is a lot closer to how it was in the mid-80s than any other point during that period.

Especially post-9/11 up until COVID it was practically Disneyland. You had little chance of being a victim of random crime in the vast majority of city neighborhoods or on the subway. That's certainly not true anymore. (Caveat: In 2009 I was drive-by shot at on gang initiation night on 96th St & Columbus Ave in Manhattan. Yes, it happened, but place and time are important factors.)

Also we've seen a return of large storefront vacancy numbers in Manhattan.

Where I live now people truly do not lock their doors. Most garage doors in my neighborhood stay open 24/7.

[vundercind]

I think to some degree the problem is a combo of some overestimating among part of the population (driven in part by recall of actual historical crime rates, and by anti-"blue"-city news media) of how dangerous big cities are, but also a huge failure to appreciate how dangerous lots of non-big-city places in the US are. It's not entirely that big US cities are necessarily super-safe (they're largely not, if you compare to international peers) but that lots of non-big-city parts of the US are shockingly dangerous, including many parts that folks don't expect to be.

> Where I live now people truly do not lock their doors. Most garage doors in my neighborhood stay open 24/7.

Rich suburban and small towns—and I mean where the whole area's kinda rich, not just a few neighborhoods—are in fact the sort of safe that lots of people incorrectly assume all suburbs and small towns are. I know how it is, I (now) live in one of those too, so Manhattan is in-fact more dangerous than where I am (these days). :-)

Like, my kid's neurologist lives just up our street and there's a country club every half mile, it seems like. Yeah, this particular place is quite safe. Go figure, if there's vanishingly little poverty around there's also very little violent crime. But lots of US suburbs, rural towns, small suburban towns, and smaller cities are really, really poor and there doesn't (any more? Maybe ever?) seem to be some kind of aw-shucks folksiness of attitude that effectively counters the effects of that—they're just as crime-ridden and dangerous as you'd expect, from the poverty stats.

[ryandrake]

Per capita tells the real story. I'd take Chicago or New York over any small town in, say, rural Mississippi or Alabama[1]. Yet [certain] media's "big liberal cities = bad" narrative continues...

1: https://www.police1.com/ambush/articles/10-us-counties-with-...

[vundercind]

There's a long-running genre of clickbaity story (that's been around since before "clickbait") that runs something like "America's five most dangerous cities!" and reads like the list of places many people believe are exceptionally-dangerous in the US (because of these stories...) but people consistently read them poorly (and media know this, so are basically lying on purpose, but big city names being on the list gets more attention, for multiple reasons, than if the list were mostly small cities).

The rhetorical trick here is the cut-off point. For one thing, you're limiting it to cities in the first place. For another, take a look to see where their cut-off for size of city under consideration is—the higher it is, the more it'll skew toward big names (duh) so they almost always set it pretty high, and the lower you make the cut-off, the farther (most) of those plummet down and off the list as small and mid-sized cities take over.

[saltminer]

It's wild the tales [certain] media outlets tell. When I moved to Chicago, I got no end of suggestions to buy a gun, get bulletproof glass for my car, increase my life insurance policy...

Sure, the deep south and west sides might be not be too nice (particularly at night), but that's mostly gangs shooting at each other. My neighborhood is actually quite nice, but even if you take the city as a whole, the violent crime rate is 639.7 per 100,000 people [0] or 5.38 per 1,000 [1], depending on what source you go by (but I'll just use the 639.7 figure since that actually makes the city look worse). Compare this to Houston, TX: 11.35 per 1,000 people [2], Dallas, TX: 7.71 per 1,000 [3], or Nashville, TN: 10.95 per 1,000 [4].

So, 0.006397 (Chicago) vs 0.01135 (Houston) vs 0.00771 (Dallas) vs 0.01095 (Nashville). Hmmm...seems like Chicago is slightly more peaceful than Dallas, I'm 1.77x more likely to be the victim of a violent crime in Houston, and 1.71x more likely in Nashville. One has to wonder, if Chicago is apparently a warzone, why [certain] media outlets aren't equating Houston and Nashville to Fallujah.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Chicago

[1]: https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/il/chicago/crime

[2]: https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/tx/houston/crime

[3]: https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/tx/dallas/crime

[4]: https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/tn/nashville/crime

[busterarm]

We're not that rich here. We're just in a permissive firearm state with a high rate of military service. The houses here are average, but my neighbors are active and retired military, retired cops, the state governor's official security detail, lots of tradespeople etc.

There's a trailer park 2 minutes down the road and lots of small family farms here.

[vundercind]

Check the crime stats. You might be surprised. Exceptions exist, but... they're exceptions. My 5x-Manahattan's-violent-crime-rate former home county pretty well fit that description, and many locals believed it was quite safe. The stats tell another story.

[busterarm]

Oh I know there's crime here in my city, but it doesn't reach my neighborhood.

Also the thing is the vast majority of the crime here is targeted. It's violence between gangs/drug dealers. It will never have anything to do with me.

But in NY and Chicago (especially Chicago) I know lots of average, unaffiliated people who have been robbed at gunpoint. Also large amounts of crime in NY goes unreported because people mind their business and/or don't trust the cops. They literally have had a "if you see something, say something" campaign for most of my life for this reason.

I've literally seen people step over people who were bleeding out from stab wounds in the NYC subway. I witnessed multiple violent crimes while living in NYC.

[vundercind]

> Also large amounts of crime in NY goes unreported because people mind their business and/or don't trust the cops.

Yes, crime stats are a mess for a bunch of reasons. The most-reliable are murder stats, because they rarely go unreported or otherwise unnoticed, and are the hardest to "juke the stats" on, especially if you try to do it for more than a brief span of time. Those are better in scary ol' Manhattan than in much of "safe" small town, small city, and suburban America, and often way better.

[mindslight]

In 2024, what you're describing is rich. The neighbors you describe feel like they have a place in society. They had (and likely continue to have!) a steady and decent government income, rather than the continual screw turning of the corporate-inflationary wealth extraction machine. They all have assets to lose if their kids were to step out of line. Their specific jobs also provided them with the non-monetary benefit of firearms and other defensive training that would have otherwise cost ~ten thousand dollars of discretionary income to learn on its own. Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're on the pleasant side of the bifurcating society.

[nyarlathotep_]

> Rich suburban and small towns—and I mean where the whole area's kinda rich, not just a few neighborhoods—are in fact the sort of safe that lots of people incorrectly assume all suburbs and small towns are. I know how it is, I (now) live in one of those too, so Manhattan is in-fact more dangerous than where I am (these days). :-)

Literally no.

Where I grew up was below median household income and remains that way today (most of it by a good amount) and was by every literal metric safe.

[vundercind]

Not every small town or small/midsize city or suburb is notably dangerous. Some are safe. Some are even safe and arguably also poor—poor-small-town Vermont, to take an example, tends to be more than a tad statistically different from poor-small-town Arkansas, say, if you want to carve out a whole category of poorish-small-town that may be relatively safe. And anywhere, exceptions may exist.

A whole shitload of them have much higher murder rates than NYC and several other "bad" big cities, though, and it's just about never the rich places of that sort that are high-crime (go figure). Yet, for folks who live in those demonstrably-dangerous places and travel, local members of their family commonly freak out about their visiting big cities that are, statistically, a lot safer than the place they're leaving to make the visit. This is due to wild misperceptions of where the dangerous parts of the US are—some are in big cities, but a lot aren't, and many of the "bad" big cities are actually relatively safe, if you compare them to smaller cities and towns.

What I meant is that if you want to look at small towns and suburbs and consistently find ones that are safe, you're going to want to limit your search to the relatively rich ones. That's a category that largely does fit the assumptions of safety that people have for small towns and suburbs in general (which assumption holds... less well, with a wider net cast)

[MaskedMan]

I'm still waiting for someone to name me a major American city that isn't a blue city. If every major city is blue, then there isn't anything to compare it to. At least NY has had a couple of Republican mayors this century, but I doubt the same could be said of San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia or Boston.

Big cities will naturally have more crime than little villages, but as someone else mentioned, per capita stats are key.

[rsanek]

people in your neighborhood leave garage doors open overnight? never heard of this. seems like you'd want to keep wildlife out at minimum.

[r00fus]

Anecdotally one of my colleagues recently moved from W. Va to the CA and his entire family are constantly fearful for his family because they have been conditioned to think liberal cities (and even CA in general) is a crime-infested cesspit. Like his whole family is praying for him weekly - even many months after the move.

[vundercind]

My ex-home red state has double the murder rate of NYC. Not New York State, the city. DOUBLE. The stats where I actually lived were even worse (and I lived in one of the better counties in my area).

Nonetheless, always the tedious ritual of warnings and concern when I traveled to any "real" city. Like, guys, save that shit for when I'm coming back. I should be warning you, I'm leaving danger. And please stop watching cable news and listening to AM radio.

[TheCoelacanth]

And it's likely even worse if you include traffic deaths. NYC is actually one of the safest places in the entire country https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-11-18/how-ar...

[mrguyorama]

My brother once told my mother to warn me about "Protests" in my city around the time that Portland Oregon was having it's fun. The vibe he sold her was a busy protest crowding through the streets shouting slogans and clashes with police.

The actual protest was about ten people laying on the ground in front of the police station in silence. There were a couple cops standing in front of the building, presumably slightly less bored than doing paperwork at their desk. Most people in my city didn't even know it happened.

It's insane the reality they live in. These people will see https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.... and chuckle and say how bad the "mainstream media" is and then go back to watching Fox News scream about how a liberal city is on fire with protests despite NOTHING HAPPENING. I can't understand the willful, intentional ignorance that leads people to believe watching an hour of Fox News makes them knowledgeable about a city of a million people.