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> The crime was already there ... Crime as at generational (multi-generational?) lows. People are solving a problem that no longer exists. An American friend

> The crime was already there ... Crime as at generational (multi-generational?) lows. People are solving a problem that no longer exists. An American friend of mine is terrified of going into cities; it's bizarre. I've spent a lot of time in American cities, in all sorts of neighborhoods; I've never had a problem. (Like other American conservatives I've talked to, he also seems to define himself as being in opposition to liberals, in this case by putting down cities and their residents; so perhaps it's partly a political thing. However, it's a bit bizarre that political rhetoric would be confused with reality.)

dx87 8y ago
I don't think it's a political thing, people in cities just seem to have different expectations than people that don't. I live in the suburbs and there isn't anywhere nearby that I would worry about going. My co-worker who lives in the city says that it's dangerous to go 2 blocks from his house at night, but thinks that's normal. My wife has a co-worker who's had someone repeatedly try and break into her house, but she doesn't call the cops because she just considers it part of city life. There are some things that people in cities put up with that I think they only accept because it's been part of their entire life.
- forapurpose 8y ago
  > My co-worker who lives in the city says that it's dangerous to go 2 blocks from his house at night, but thinks that's normal. My wife has a co-worker who's had someone repeatedly try and break into her house, but she doesn't call the cops because she just considers it part of city life. I know many, many people who live in American cities, and I don't know even one person with those experiences or attitudes (unless you mean, there is a specific spot within 2 blocks that feels potentially dangerous in the middle of the night - a 4 square block area in a dense city is a large area with potentially tens of thousands of people). However, I do know people in suburbs or rural areas with those attitudes and stories. In my experience, almost all the scary stories about cities come from people who don't actually live there - and the less experience they have, the more scary stories they seem to tell, similar to other bogeymen like racial stereotypes. Some people in rural areas seem to love to tell these stories these days. People I know in cities usually talk about how great it is - or at least how they could never live in the suburbs. I guess we can argue about anecdata, but the actual data shows that crime is very low. EDIT: Many edits, mostly reorganization
  - rayiner 8y ago
    I wouldn't go that far. When we lived in downtown Baltimore, we definitely told our nanny that there were neighborhoods where the crime was high enough she probably didn't want to go there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandtown-Winchester,_Baltimore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandtown-Winchester,_Baltimore. And when we lived in Wilmington, DE, if you went a few blocks south from our apartment (across an underpass beneath the highway), you got to a neighborhood where the crime rate was so high that the EMTs once refused to pick up a dead body after a shooting. Also in Wilmington, someone was shot at the Nike on Market street waiting for a new shoe to be released at like 6 am. Someone was mugged outside my wife's office (in the nice part of the central business district) at 5 pm. In the city, crime is low enough where you will probably not be a victim of crime (especially if you're wealthy). But it's happening around you, you're aware of it, and property crimes are a real risk if you're not careful. Meanwhile, now we live in the Annapolis suburbs, and I don't even lock my car when I park it.
- teddyh 8y ago
  > My co-worker who lives in the city says that it's dangerous to go 2 blocks from his house at night, but thinks that's normal. It’s probably completely safe. These kinds of stories are normal for people. If you ask indigenous people, the dangerous cannibals are always the tribe living two valleys over from this one, but never themselves or their immediate neighbors.
80386 8y ago
> Crime as at generational (multi-generational?) lows. People are solving a problem that no longer exists. Crime rates are decreasing, but they're still very high. Glasgow at its worst had a homicide rate of 63 per million.[1] In America, homicide rates are generally reported per 100k - so that's 6.3 per 100k. In 2015, San Francisco had a homicide rate of 6.1 per 100k. Pittsburgh, which I hear is trying to become a tech hub, was at 18.6 per 100k. Pittsburgh! We don't think of Pittsburgh as a hotbed of crime. But Glasgow was notorious - with a third the homicide rate! [1] https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12447424.Murder_rates_at_10-year_high__Has_nothing_changed_since_razor_gangs_/ https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12447424.Murder_rates_at... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
- astrodust 8y ago
  American cities are astonishingly dangerous compared to their European and even Canadian counterparts. This isn't just a big city problem. Many small towns are absolutely rife with violent crime. Suburban areas are, per-capita, not exactly safe either. It's vastly more dangerous to be in suburban Alabama than in pretty much any European city. It's like Americans prefer to solve their problems with guns and guns alone. You can get shot at for simply passing someone in some states, road rage all too often ends with shots fired.
- ip26 8y ago
  Wait a minute, 18.6 per 100k is a per-year statement. So if you lived in Pittsburgh all your life, you have something like a 1.5% lifetime chance of being murdered? Is that right? One in sixty-ish?
  - newen 8y ago
    Usually people kill people that they already know. So you would have to condition the probability on people you know and where you usually are.
  - MagnumOpus 8y ago
    That is correct, though it would be more correct to observe that this rate is only about 0.3% for white Pittsburgers but nearly 10% for black men. (Black males make up 12% of the population but about 80% of murder victims.)
Xcelerate 8y ago
> An American friend of mine is terrified of going into cities; it's bizarre. I've spent a lot of time in American cities, in all sorts of neighborhoods; I've never had a problem. Speak for yourself. I lived in downtown Atlanta from 2008-2012. In that time, someone broke into the building I lived in and robbed the person in the room below me at gunpoint. I also saw someone get bashed in the head with a rock. And my sister in law’s neighbors were robbed at gunpoint while trick-or-treating. There were two children in that group. She also had a lawyer acquaintance who was taken out by someone for hire on the sidewalk in the middle of the day. Oh, and my friend’s boyfriend was robbed on the sidewalk at gunpoint at 5:00 PM right next to rush hour traffic. I’ve been in San Francisco for a little while now and don’t feel significantly safer. It’s easy to say there are no problems when nothing has happened to you personally.
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  > It’s easy to say there are no problems when nothing has happened to you personally. That's why anecdotes are not very helpful.
scythe 8y ago
>Crime as at generational (multi-generational?) lows Crime rates were much lower before about 1960, and are often argued to have been similarly low in the early 20th century and late 19th century. There are a variety of suggested causes, but the most obvious one is heroin, which became a drug of abuse in the '10s, disappeared during WWII, and then came roaring back. It's difficult for modern Westerners to imagine a time before heroin, but it makes sense to me that crime rates would have been lower. The feelings associated with being a good person are usually enough to motivate people to be good, but they don't hold a candle to heroin's flamethrower. This hypothesis also explains Japan and Australia's relative safety, since geography is on their side.
mixmastamyk 8y ago
These sorts of folks are often afraid of travel of any sort and are hooked on fear-based television. When I was younger I traveled a lot and found that the things people think about other countries (or nearby cities) are mostly false.

dx87 8y ago

I don't think it's a political thing, people in cities just seem to have different expectations than people that don't. I live in the suburbs and there isn't anywhere nearby that I would worry about going. My co-worker who lives in the city says that it's dangerous to go 2 blocks from his house at night, but thinks that's normal. My wife has a co-worker who's had someone repeatedly try and break into her house, but she doesn't call the cops because she just considers it part of city life. There are some things that people in cities put up with that I think they only accept because it's been part of their entire life.

forapurpose 8y ago
> My co-worker who lives in the city says that it's dangerous to go 2 blocks from his house at night, but thinks that's normal. My wife has a co-worker who's had someone repeatedly try and break into her house, but she doesn't call the cops because she just considers it part of city life. I know many, many people who live in American cities, and I don't know even one person with those experiences or attitudes (unless you mean, there is a specific spot within 2 blocks that feels potentially dangerous in the middle of the night - a 4 square block area in a dense city is a large area with potentially tens of thousands of people). However, I do know people in suburbs or rural areas with those attitudes and stories. In my experience, almost all the scary stories about cities come from people who don't actually live there - and the less experience they have, the more scary stories they seem to tell, similar to other bogeymen like racial stereotypes. Some people in rural areas seem to love to tell these stories these days. People I know in cities usually talk about how great it is - or at least how they could never live in the suburbs. I guess we can argue about anecdata, but the actual data shows that crime is very low. EDIT: Many edits, mostly reorganization
- rayiner 8y ago
  I wouldn't go that far. When we lived in downtown Baltimore, we definitely told our nanny that there were neighborhoods where the crime was high enough she probably didn't want to go there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandtown-Winchester,_Baltimore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandtown-Winchester,_Baltimore. And when we lived in Wilmington, DE, if you went a few blocks south from our apartment (across an underpass beneath the highway), you got to a neighborhood where the crime rate was so high that the EMTs once refused to pick up a dead body after a shooting. Also in Wilmington, someone was shot at the Nike on Market street waiting for a new shoe to be released at like 6 am. Someone was mugged outside my wife's office (in the nice part of the central business district) at 5 pm. In the city, crime is low enough where you will probably not be a victim of crime (especially if you're wealthy). But it's happening around you, you're aware of it, and property crimes are a real risk if you're not careful. Meanwhile, now we live in the Annapolis suburbs, and I don't even lock my car when I park it.
teddyh 8y ago
> My co-worker who lives in the city says that it's dangerous to go 2 blocks from his house at night, but thinks that's normal. It’s probably completely safe. These kinds of stories are normal for people. If you ask indigenous people, the dangerous cannibals are always the tribe living two valleys over from this one, but never themselves or their immediate neighbors.

80386 8y ago

> Crime as at generational (multi-generational?) lows. People are solving a problem that no longer exists. Crime rates are decreasing, but they're still very high. Glasgow at its worst had a homicide rate of 63 per million.[1] In America, homicide rates are generally reported per 100k - so that's 6.3 per 100k. In 2015, San Francisco had a homicide rate of 6.1 per 100k. Pittsburgh, which I hear is trying to become a tech hub, was at 18.6 per 100k. Pittsburgh! We don't think of Pittsburgh as a hotbed of crime. But Glasgow was notorious - with a third the homicide rate! [1] https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12447424.Murder_rates_at_10-year_high__Has_nothing_changed_since_razor_gangs_/ https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12447424.Murder_rates_at... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

astrodust 8y ago
American cities are astonishingly dangerous compared to their European and even Canadian counterparts. This isn't just a big city problem. Many small towns are absolutely rife with violent crime. Suburban areas are, per-capita, not exactly safe either. It's vastly more dangerous to be in suburban Alabama than in pretty much any European city. It's like Americans prefer to solve their problems with guns and guns alone. You can get shot at for simply passing someone in some states, road rage all too often ends with shots fired.
ip26 8y ago
Wait a minute, 18.6 per 100k is a per-year statement. So if you lived in Pittsburgh all your life, you have something like a 1.5% lifetime chance of being murdered? Is that right? One in sixty-ish?
- newen 8y ago
  Usually people kill people that they already know. So you would have to condition the probability on people you know and where you usually are.
- MagnumOpus 8y ago
  That is correct, though it would be more correct to observe that this rate is only about 0.3% for white Pittsburgers but nearly 10% for black men. (Black males make up 12% of the population but about 80% of murder victims.)

Xcelerate 8y ago

> An American friend of mine is terrified of going into cities; it's bizarre. I've spent a lot of time in American cities, in all sorts of neighborhoods; I've never had a problem. Speak for yourself. I lived in downtown Atlanta from 2008-2012. In that time, someone broke into the building I lived in and robbed the person in the room below me at gunpoint. I also saw someone get bashed in the head with a rock. And my sister in law’s neighbors were robbed at gunpoint while trick-or-treating. There were two children in that group. She also had a lawyer acquaintance who was taken out by someone for hire on the sidewalk in the middle of the day. Oh, and my friend’s boyfriend was robbed on the sidewalk at gunpoint at 5:00 PM right next to rush hour traffic. I’ve been in San Francisco for a little while now and don’t feel significantly safer. It’s easy to say there are no problems when nothing has happened to you personally.

mixmastamyk 8y ago
> It’s easy to say there are no problems when nothing has happened to you personally. That's why anecdotes are not very helpful.

scythe 8y ago

>Crime as at generational (multi-generational?) lows Crime rates were much lower before about 1960, and are often argued to have been similarly low in the early 20th century and late 19th century. There are a variety of suggested causes, but the most obvious one is heroin, which became a drug of abuse in the '10s, disappeared during WWII, and then came roaring back. It's difficult for modern Westerners to imagine a time before heroin, but it makes sense to me that crime rates would have been lower. The feelings associated with being a good person are usually enough to motivate people to be good, but they don't hold a candle to heroin's flamethrower. This hypothesis also explains Japan and Australia's relative safety, since geography is on their side.

mixmastamyk 8y ago

These sorts of folks are often afraid of travel of any sort and are hooked on fear-based television. When I was younger I traveled a lot and found that the things people think about other countries (or nearby cities) are mostly false.