> NYC is generally safer than the rest of America.
I don't think that's true: NYC is at 5.8 violent crimes per 1,000, and the national median sits at 4.0. That's 45% more violent than the median. That's not small! I feel like some PR firm must have implanted this idea in everyone's minds that NYC is somehow magically safer, but it's not showing up in the stats, and if the stats are skewed by reporting its almost certainly worse, not better.
I don’t know. I never felt generally unsafe in New York if I was out late at night (after midnight or 1am) and walking alone to the subway or whatever. Part of it I think is that the city “never sleeps” so you don’t get the feeling of being alone. There’s always other people around.
(My mom felt differently and would often force me to take a car home if I was leaving the office at 10pm in NYC — but my mom would feel that way about any city I lived in.)
In SF, I’ve felt *very* unsafe being out before midnight (I was once propositioned for prostitution 4 times in a 2 block walk). Same in Seattle, where my own neighborhood has felt downright unsafe after 7pm on certain nights. Same in parts of Atlanta. Same in parts of LA.
I can’t compare it to places like New Hampshire or the suburbs — but I’m a female who weighs between 105 and 110lbs and yes, I’m white so that might help me, and I haven’t been to every part of NYC late at night — I’m sure there are places I wouldn’t want to be alone — but I do think that it is generally safe.
I was shocked by how much more crime was in Seattle than where I lived in Brooklyn.
There is another part of New York which is just that people generally leave you alone. So you’re surrounded by people who you can call out for help to, but you’re also not usually badgered by randos on the street.
I can’t talk about statistics but I can talk about how safe I feel. And I feel safer in NYC than any other major US city I’ve lived in or visited.
I think this is where statistics fails me. You (and a couple sibling comments) are responding to my comment with your experiences to the contrary, and I—never having lived in NYC—just don't have access to that.
This passage[1] probably sums up the difference between aggregate crime stats and NYC residents' own assessments:
> Looking at NYPD crime reports for 2010, 2015, and 2020, we find that about 1% of streets in NYC produce about 25% of crime, and about 5% of streets produce about 50% of crime. This is consistent across the three years, showing that a very small proportion of streets in the city are responsible for a significant proportion of the crime problem.
I wonder if this phenomenon is different in different cities. Are the "shapes" of crime all "spiky" in New York, but more spread out in Seattle?
The "spikiness" of crime in NYC is extreme. I lived about two blocks away from a housing project which had a low but steady rate of assault, rape, and even the occasional murder. You wouldn't know it on my street and I never felt unsafe. I think the density of the city and relative lack of car mobility makes crime extremely non-uniformly distributed compared to most other cities (where everyone drives).
I grew up in Indianapolis, where the violent crime rate is 8.7 per 1000. Growing up, we had plenty of trips to Columbus, OH (16.6), Detroit, MI (21.8), Cincinnati, OH (8.9), and, yes, Chicago, IL (9.9).
Granted, sometimes we'd visit smaller, safer college towns, like Purdue's Lafayette Indiana University's Bloomington, or Ball State's Muncie, IN. Only Muncie had a lower crime rate than NYC. Then again, Notre Dame's South Bend (17.3) University of Evansville (10.1), and Rose-Hulman's Terre Haute (14.6) kind of dispelled the idea of college town safefy.
My current town is at 36 violent crime per 1000 residents, but the statistics are collected differently, so it may not be an exact comparison.
NYC isn't safer than the majority of the country. But, compared to where I've been, it's felt pretty safe every time I stopped by.
I’ve heard this stat before, but comparing to large cities.
NY is generally safer than Chicago, LA, Seattle, Boston, and Fort Worth; Wikipedia places it in 59th place for most violent crime per capita amongst the nation’s largest 100 cities.
The problem with any of these comparisons is that cities are very heterogeneous. In Boston, the Back Bay != Roxbury and in NYC, the West Village != the South Bronx. However, at least absent a doorman, I probably wouldn't leave a door unlocked or an accessible window ajar the way I routinely do in my (only) semi-rural home in New England. When I visit people in cities, I have to consciously remember that they'll be unhappy if I am casual about such things like I am at home.
I mean…or it’s that some of us have lived in New York for decades and not experienced even a little bit of violent crime. Born and raised New Yorker here.
Now look at dangers in general and not just crime and the picture is very different[1]. Judging by the total number of deaths from external causes, NYC was the second safest metro area in the country behind only Boston.
Much of that is because NYC has drastically fewer transportation deaths than most of the US. The worst states have literally twenty times as many traffic deaths as NYC.
I think that overall crime rates can have severely skewed reporting. Homicide rate in NYC is 5.5 vs US average of 7.5, But manhattan's is even lower. The last time the city reported the borough by borough breakdown (2019), had a homicide rate of 3.2.
I've only ever heard the claim made in reference to other large cities, not suburban, rural, or exurban parts of the country.
Its trivially true that dense urban environments are going to have different baseline patterns of crime
It also seems pretty clear to me that this is the context OP was speaking in, given that almost everything else he described are features of big cities.
I don’t think the relative percent is a good way to compare 5.8 per 1000 vs 4.0 per 1000. It can easily be flipped to show that NYC is only 0.18% less safe than the national median.
I don't think that's true: NYC is at 5.8 violent crimes per 1,000, and the national median sits at 4.0. That's 45% more violent than the median. That's not small! I feel like some PR firm must have implanted this idea in everyone's minds that NYC is somehow magically safer, but it's not showing up in the stats, and if the stats are skewed by reporting its almost certainly worse, not better.