11 ms·

New York City Is a Lot Safer Than Small-Town America

73 points by helloworld 4y ago

Kon-Peki 4y ago
That's a pretty good take on the data (it's incredible how bad Baltimore is). But we already knew that people worry about getting held up at gunpoint in the big city, but not so much about crashing their car on the way to the big night out (or even worse, on the way home). I live in a small village and there is currently discussion going on about extending the legal amount of time a person can keep holiday decorations on their house. On one side are the folks that think Christmas lights are way too tacky in February or March and on the other side are the folks that say the weather could easily make it too dangerous to get them down within time limits (never mind how dumb and overbearing it is to have time limits in the first place). I lived in Chicago for 20 years and some people had holiday lights on their million dollar condo balconies year round - because it is never safe to take them down lol (kidding).
- mperham 4y ago
  > I live in a small village and there is currently discussion going on about extending the legal amount of time a person can keep holiday decorations on their house. The need for some people to police *everything* is exhausting.
  - civilized 4y ago
    It's mystifying - I can't imagine having this much energy period, let alone devoting it to being a negative in other people's lives. I feel similarly about Putin invading Ukraine. How do you get up in the morning so motivated and full of energy to order kids to go massacre other kids? I can barely muster the juice to write a few lines of code and hit the gym.
    - radicaldreamer 4y ago
      A lot of it is a bunch of people paid to work 50 weeks a year making sure they have “something” to do. So they advocate for anything and everything under the sun to make those hours count.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- evanelias 4y ago
  > it's incredible how bad Baltimore is I've lived in/near NYC, Baltimore, Boston, and Philly. Baltimore's the only one where I've been mugged (at gunpoint no less), or really robbed at all. Also someone was murdered in the building across the street from my apartment, in a botched home invasion. And I lived in one of the "better" neighborhoods. Baltimore has an amazing creative scene (music/art/film/etc) and great food, and I actually really enjoyed living there, but the safety issue is quite serious. I don't think the problem is insurmountable though. I'm surprised whenever I visit Washington DC in recent years, because DC used to be even more dangerous than Baltimore, but you'd never know it today. NYC is on the complete opposite side of the spectrum. 15 years here and I've never had a serious incident, and I'm struggling to even think of anything major affecting any of my friends too.
woodruffw 4y ago
NYC is remarkably safe, and it could still be easily safer: 124 pedestrians died after being hit by cars in 2021[1], and 2022 looks like it'll continue the trend. The city has a clearance rate of just 3% for hit-and-runs, despite the extraordinary amount of money we've gifted the NYPD for comprehensive surveillance. Anecdotally, I see much more petty disregard for traffic laws by cars (including large vans and trucks) than I did before COVID. [1]: https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/last-year-was-deadliest-on-nyc-streets-in-nearly-a-decade-report-claims/3516683/ https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/last-year-was-deadlies...
- teakettle42 4y ago
  124 pedestrians in one of the most walked cities in the world, with a total population of 8.38 million, an additional 2+ million daily work commuters, tourists, and other visitors? That’s effectively zero.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    That’s just the number that died. The number hit and injured is way higher.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    Yes, it is very low! But it's still 124 unnecessary deaths, and it seems not unreasonable to want it to be lower.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  There is a lot more walking in the street than before COVID. Far more are breaking the usual jaywalking code to at least look for oncoming vehicles.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    I don't think this is true. Even if we take somewhere ridiculously tourist-foot-traffic heavy likes Times Square, 2021 was still well below 2018 and 2019[1]. [1]: https://www.timessquarenyc.org/do-business/market-research-data/pedestrian-counts https://www.timessquarenyc.org/do-business/market-research-d...
s1artibartfast 4y ago
I don't think I agree with their definition of external causes. Getting caught in a lawn mower or a death due to your own driving isn't an external cause in the same way that homicide is.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Yes, that feels like an unnecessary broadening on their part. The data (second graph) already makes the point for them: NYC did better on murder rates than everywhere except fringe counties in 2020, and even beat them in the years before.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    Keep in mind they are comparing to an average, not a median or 50th percentile of each category.
- Kon-Peki 4y ago
  If you drive (or mow) recklessly, you are at a heightened risk of death, but it is still a pretty random occurrence. If not, you have a much lower risk, and it is still pretty random should it actually occur. If you are involved in gang or other criminal behavior, you are a heightened risk of death, but it is still a pretty random occurrence. If not, you have a much lower risk, and it is still pretty random should it actually occur. I think it is pretty fair to lump them in together.
  - deepdriver 4y ago
    If you drive or mow recklessly, you suffer the results of your own choices. If you get mugged or shot on a city street, you've suffered the result of someone else's choices. Many experience more angst over the choices outside their control. I can't say I blame them.
    - Kon-Peki 4y ago
      And yet people have very little angst getting out on a road filled with other people poorly driving massive overpowered vehicles at high rates of speed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32183007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32183007
ecshafer 4y ago
You are more likely to die sure. But this is kind of lying with statistics. Cars are a huge issue though that are largely ignored in society, which I won't dispute. BUT lets look at what people talk about when they say safe. They don't necessarily mean just that they won't be murdered or not. But also if they will randomly be jumped, robbed, burgled, punched in the knock out game or hit with a brick, etc. Non-violent crime, and violent but not murder crime is probably much higher in the cities. And I say this as someone that likes cities.
- danenania 4y ago
  I haven't seen data on this, but my intuition is the opposite: that all violent crime would tend to be correlated with the murder rate. That's partly because any violent crime can easily escalate to a murder. Maybe I'm wrong though. I'm not finding a clear answer with some cursory googling, but I'd imagine this has been studied.
  - hardolaf 4y ago
    Outside of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder rate was highly correlated with the violent crime rate. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became less correlated as more people died due to a lack of available emergency healthcare while hospital systems were overloaded.
    - whimsicalism 4y ago
      What? Source please
  - bpodgursky 4y ago
    This would be true if crimes were all reported, but most low-level violence isn't.
    - bobthepanda 4y ago
      There’s also enough variance in how things get classified by police departments that a lot of studies just end up counting murder and manslaughter since those are pretty standard and hard to fudge.
quickthrower2 4y ago
Also you earn more in a big city and that actually makes you safer (or the opportunity to be safer) in many ways.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  I found it interesting that in some realestate videos for NYC apartments, there would be big black vans parked out the front by security and the realestate agent wasn’t permitted to film in the lobby. Doors and locks might not be sufficient for security but full time employees guarding the building would.
- Gibbon1 4y ago
  I saw a comment that in the Bay Area if you're a lower income working class white male your life expectancy is notably higher than in fly over places.
exabrial 4y ago
This is so delusional it's laughable. My parents have left their car doors unlocked, their house wide open, keys on the dash, money in plain sight, for 40+ years. Not once, not even even once, has a theft occurred. Violent crime however is a certain reality in NYC.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  This is apples and oranges: the article is about death (and violent crimes), not theft. That said, the numbers don't really lie: New York (the state, including the city) ranks lowest in burglaries per capita[1]. For larceny theft, the state is also towards the bottom[2]. Those are state numbers, of course, but almost half of the state lives in the city. [1]: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-most-burglaries-in-the-us.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-most-burglaries-in-t... [2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/232583/larceny-theft-rate-in-the-us-by-state/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/232583/larceny-theft-rat...
  - systemvoltage 4y ago
    Why not use NYC data? Seems less Apples to Oranges.
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      Because I was too lazy to pull CompStat[1]. But here you go: * NYC recorded 6,486 burglaries in 2021, for a population of 8.38 million. That's 77.39 burglaries per 100,000 people, which makes the city's burglary rate lower than the rest of the state. * The city recorded 18,862 grand larcenies in 2021, for the same population. That's 225.08 larcenies per 100,000 people, which is also lower than the rest of the state. Both burglaries and larceny are up this year, significantly. But even if they double, NYC will still be well below national and state averages. Edit: Correcting myself: the final statistics[2] for robbery in 2021 show 12811 robberies, for a final rate of 152.88. That's still a fraction of NY state's burglary rate, which is the lowest in the nation. For grand larceny it's 487.71, which is also still below both state and national averages (by two thirds). [1]: https://compstat.nypdonline.org https://compstat.nypdonline.org [2]: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/historical-crime-data/seven-major-felony-offenses-2000-2021.pdf https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_...
Proven 4y ago
systemvoltage 4y ago
I am curious, on surface it is appealing to use per capita numbers including the central point in the original article, but, what do you think about 1) The density of people is vastly different between some small wrecked town in Missouri vs. NYC 2) Yes, fewer X/capita, but does that really matter when you witness, experience living in an overall dangerous (absolute, not per capita) place that the chance of a dangerous activity happening within 5 blocks of your current position in NYC is far more? Shouldn't we also consider the density of people and exposure to crime? What good is it to live in a place where you're surrounded by crime in close proximity? Kowloon walled city [1] probably had less per capita crime as an extreme example of population density. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City
paulpauper 4y ago
This is yet another one of those counterintuitive findings. Similar to the UK being poorer than the poorer state in the US. Rural areas tend to have a lot of homelessness , violence, addiction, and other problems and not enough police. The notion that blue states are secular and degenerate and red rural areas are exemplars of morality and salubrity are wrong. Both urban and rural areas have problems.
- jethro_tell 4y ago
  I split my time between a rural town and an urban center. I think the murder rate is higher per 100k in the smaller area but they don't really report or have the means to effectively confirm a murder, I've seen multiple people in the last decade die of extremely unusual circumstances that were ruled suicide or accident. A man with both hands taped together inside a sleeping bag that 'shot himself in the head' A man that was 'accidentally' hit in the back of the head with a metal baseball bat. Over the last decade that I've been here, someone has died in an extremely suspicious way and there are never any reported homicides. Yet if you calculate those deaths out per 100k/year the rate is much higher than the urban area I spend time in. Yet everyone in the rural area is afraid of the dangerous city. In the end, my guess is that a lot of rural areas don't have the same quality of reporting or police presents that a city can afford.
- political12345 4y ago
gojomo 4y ago
There's a ton of fishy things in this methodology. To borrow from my Twitter comments (https://twitter.com/gojomo/status/1534554504275714051 https://twitter.com/gojomo/status/1534554504275714051) when this article was new: I'm open to the idea NYC safer than its reputation; I appreciate NYC a lot, and live in another city, San Francisco, with a 'meaner' rep than I think true/fair. But, there's a bunch of things that make me suspicious of the main graph/rankings: (1) Leaving out suicide & drug ODs. These vary a lot by region, so whether a region creates motive & opportunity to throw your life away is a relevant 'safeness' indicator, for most people. (2) Leaving out "accidental poisonings" & "falls". These may hide violence & other dangerous living conditions, especially in dense cities, or marginal communities, where many simply don't bother to report to authorities every assault - but do still have to seek medical care for an ‘accident’. People in "small town America" die of these things too, so why shouldn't a 'safeness' metric include them? (3) The author uses a vague catchall exclusion category "sequelae of external causes of morbidity and mortality" that risks hiding relevant dangers, including even aftereffects of earlier violent-injuries, depending on coding standards of exact/immediate cause-of-death. (4) For the widely-forwarded horizontal bar-graph titled "America’s Safest Metro Areas, but not all the analyses, the author uses the whole "New York-Newark, NY-NJ-PA" metro. The nearest part of PA to NYC seems to be Delaware Water Gap, 80 miles/1h40m away! So this winds up including a lot of 'small towns' & suburbs, not really "NYC" itself. Altogether, when there's this many footnotes about a custom & perhaps idiosyncratic-to-the-author definition of "external causes", there's reason for pause before shouting a pleasingly-contrarian result from the rooftops. I asked the Bloomberg author for details of the ICD-10 codes used in his custom definitions – https://twitter.com/gojomo/status/1534624384102461440 https://twitter.com/gojomo/status/1534624384102461440 – but he did not respond.
user3939382 4y ago
Nope. Just moved from 15 years in Upper East Side. People that should be in an insane asylum are walking around everywhere. One of these guys was recently walking around daily attacking random people unprovoked. And this is in an expensive area of the city. Go walk around 86th btwn Lex and 3rd at night and let me know what your study says then. NYC is dangerous, filthy, and extremely expensive. Every day I’m thankful I’m out of there.
- halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
  I lived in UES from 2016 - 2019 around 77th and 2nd. Anybody there during that time can remember the "Spitting Lady" who lived around the area and would literally spit on passer-bys, scream at the top of her lungs for hours on end and who also had a son with mental illness who would act as muscle for her/intimidate people who dared mess with her. The point is NYC still has big city problems (one could argue the biggest, because it is the biggest), especially around homelessness and how to correctly provide care for them. That does not mean NYC is not safe. I have never felt safer living in both Manhattan and Queens, as opposed to the Bay Area or living in Chicago. Also this fascination with NYC and it's trash situation is such a tired and frankly disingenuous dig at the city. While it is expensive, no argue there, it is not dangerous or filthy. You'd think after having lived there for 15 years you'd have some pride in becoming a New Yorker (lord knows I do and weep for the fact I no longer live there) but maybe the city is better off without you.
  - loh 4y ago
    I'm like 90% sure I was spit on by this woman during a week long business trip in 2018. I ignored it and kept walking. Figured she just didn't like the cut of my jib or something, but I guess it makes sense that it'd be a regular occurrence and I feel slightly less bad about it now.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - LecroJS 4y ago
IceHegel 4y ago
I live in NY. Most people in NY will not agree with this article. This is not because sensationalist media has successfully tricked them into thinking there is more crime than there is, but because they have directly experienced the rise in crime in their daily lives.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  > This is not because sensationalist media has successfully tricked them into thinking there is more crime than there is . . . it's because they never leave the metro area or even consider conditions anywhere else. That was my experience living there, anyway. A glaring blindness to anything not NY, where everything happens.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  Just like most people would say that living conditions have gotten worse in the past 50 years. People will say all sorts of kooky things based on vibes.
- halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
  Crime is up across the entire country, especially in large urban metros. That being said NYC is still incredibly safe relative to its size. New Yorkers need some perspective. I'm writing from Chicago after having moved from NYC last year.
c_o_n_v_e_x 4y ago
Publication owned by former Mayor of New York city publishes article that states "New York City is a lot safer than Small-Town America." No conflict of interest here.
xbar 4y ago
I am glad this was posted in Opinion on Bloomberg. Drugs, cars, suicide, falls, and murder kill rural folks more than New Yorkers. Drugs and cars seem to be the outsized killers, based on the data provided. I would like to see the data about where people died, not where they lived, as part of these measurements. It might not tell you where to live, but it would tell you where not to go.
Justsignedup 4y ago
Whats important to note here: NYC has a FUCKTON OF PEOPLE. And crime isn't uniformaly spread among it all. Some small sub-sections could be accounting for dispraportionately more than others. So with both of those things, the liklihood of a crime happening is very high. But not per 100k people. That's the big difference. If there is 1 shooting per 100k people, and there are 5 million people around, that's 50 shootings. Vs if you have only 10,000 people around. At 10,000 people, you might see a shooting every 5 years, but proportionately that's double the NYC rate. That's where the visibility vs reality is so counter-intuitive. Also interestingly enough, I see A LOT of homeless (I work near a shelter). And they are indeed crazy looking. But honestly the worst they do is yell at you, and often its because they haven't had real human contact in months. Just imagine being isolated inside a massive crowd.
- webshit2 4y ago
  I just replace "something happened in nyc" with "something happened in Wyoming or Alaska or North Dakota or South Dakota or Montana or Maine or Nebraska" when looking at Fox News headlines about how this city is apparently imploding.
betwixthewires 4y ago
Is it against HN rules to just flat out call bullshit on an article?

73 points by helloworld 4y ago

That's a pretty good take on the data (it's incredible how bad Baltimore is). But we already knew that people worry about getting held up at gunpoint in the big city, but not so much about crashing their car on the way to the big night out (or even worse, on the way home). I live in a small village and there is currently discussion going on about extending the legal amount of time a person can keep holiday decorations on their house. On one side are the folks that think Christmas lights are way too tacky in February or March and on the other side are the folks that say the weather could easily make it too dangerous to get them down within time limits (never mind how dumb and overbearing it is to have time limits in the first place). I lived in Chicago for 20 years and some people had holiday lights on their million dollar condo balconies year round - because it is never safe to take them down lol (kidding).

mperham 4y ago
> I live in a small village and there is currently discussion going on about extending the legal amount of time a person can keep holiday decorations on their house. The need for some people to police *everything* is exhausting.
- civilized 4y ago
  It's mystifying - I can't imagine having this much energy period, let alone devoting it to being a negative in other people's lives. I feel similarly about Putin invading Ukraine. How do you get up in the morning so motivated and full of energy to order kids to go massacre other kids? I can barely muster the juice to write a few lines of code and hit the gym.
  - radicaldreamer 4y ago
    A lot of it is a bunch of people paid to work 50 weeks a year making sure they have “something” to do. So they advocate for anything and everything under the sun to make those hours count.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
evanelias 4y ago
> it's incredible how bad Baltimore is I've lived in/near NYC, Baltimore, Boston, and Philly. Baltimore's the only one where I've been mugged (at gunpoint no less), or really robbed at all. Also someone was murdered in the building across the street from my apartment, in a botched home invasion. And I lived in one of the "better" neighborhoods. Baltimore has an amazing creative scene (music/art/film/etc) and great food, and I actually really enjoyed living there, but the safety issue is quite serious. I don't think the problem is insurmountable though. I'm surprised whenever I visit Washington DC in recent years, because DC used to be even more dangerous than Baltimore, but you'd never know it today. NYC is on the complete opposite side of the spectrum. 15 years here and I've never had a serious incident, and I'm struggling to even think of anything major affecting any of my friends too.

woodruffw 4y ago

NYC is remarkably safe, and it could still be easily safer: 124 pedestrians died after being hit by cars in 2021[1], and 2022 looks like it'll continue the trend. The city has a clearance rate of just 3% for hit-and-runs, despite the extraordinary amount of money we've gifted the NYPD for comprehensive surveillance. Anecdotally, I see much more petty disregard for traffic laws by cars (including large vans and trucks) than I did before COVID. [1]: https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/last-year-was-deadliest-on-nyc-streets-in-nearly-a-decade-report-claims/3516683/ https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/last-year-was-deadlies...

teakettle42 4y ago
124 pedestrians in one of the most walked cities in the world, with a total population of 8.38 million, an additional 2+ million daily work commuters, tourists, and other visitors? That’s effectively zero.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  That’s just the number that died. The number hit and injured is way higher.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Yes, it is very low! But it's still 124 unnecessary deaths, and it seems not unreasonable to want it to be lower.
kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
There is a lot more walking in the street than before COVID. Far more are breaking the usual jaywalking code to at least look for oncoming vehicles.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  I don't think this is true. Even if we take somewhere ridiculously tourist-foot-traffic heavy likes Times Square, 2021 was still well below 2018 and 2019[1]. [1]: https://www.timessquarenyc.org/do-business/market-research-data/pedestrian-counts https://www.timessquarenyc.org/do-business/market-research-d...

s1artibartfast 4y ago

I don't think I agree with their definition of external causes. Getting caught in a lawn mower or a death due to your own driving isn't an external cause in the same way that homicide is.

woodruffw 4y ago
Yes, that feels like an unnecessary broadening on their part. The data (second graph) already makes the point for them: NYC did better on murder rates than everywhere except fringe counties in 2020, and even beat them in the years before.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  Keep in mind they are comparing to an average, not a median or 50th percentile of each category.
Kon-Peki 4y ago
If you drive (or mow) recklessly, you are at a heightened risk of death, but it is still a pretty random occurrence. If not, you have a much lower risk, and it is still pretty random should it actually occur. If you are involved in gang or other criminal behavior, you are a heightened risk of death, but it is still a pretty random occurrence. If not, you have a much lower risk, and it is still pretty random should it actually occur. I think it is pretty fair to lump them in together.
- deepdriver 4y ago
  If you drive or mow recklessly, you suffer the results of your own choices. If you get mugged or shot on a city street, you've suffered the result of someone else's choices. Many experience more angst over the choices outside their control. I can't say I blame them.
  - Kon-Peki 4y ago
    And yet people have very little angst getting out on a road filled with other people poorly driving massive overpowered vehicles at high rates of speed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32183007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32183007

ecshafer 4y ago

You are more likely to die sure. But this is kind of lying with statistics. Cars are a huge issue though that are largely ignored in society, which I won't dispute. BUT lets look at what people talk about when they say safe. They don't necessarily mean just that they won't be murdered or not. But also if they will randomly be jumped, robbed, burgled, punched in the knock out game or hit with a brick, etc. Non-violent crime, and violent but not murder crime is probably much higher in the cities. And I say this as someone that likes cities.

danenania 4y ago
I haven't seen data on this, but my intuition is the opposite: that all violent crime would tend to be correlated with the murder rate. That's partly because any violent crime can easily escalate to a murder. Maybe I'm wrong though. I'm not finding a clear answer with some cursory googling, but I'd imagine this has been studied.
- hardolaf 4y ago
  Outside of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder rate was highly correlated with the violent crime rate. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became less correlated as more people died due to a lack of available emergency healthcare while hospital systems were overloaded.
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    What? Source please
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  This would be true if crimes were all reported, but most low-level violence isn't.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    There’s also enough variance in how things get classified by police departments that a lot of studies just end up counting murder and manslaughter since those are pretty standard and hard to fudge.

quickthrower2 4y ago

Also you earn more in a big city and that actually makes you safer (or the opportunity to be safer) in many ways.

Gigachad 4y ago
I found it interesting that in some realestate videos for NYC apartments, there would be big black vans parked out the front by security and the realestate agent wasn’t permitted to film in the lobby. Doors and locks might not be sufficient for security but full time employees guarding the building would.
Gibbon1 4y ago
I saw a comment that in the Bay Area if you're a lower income working class white male your life expectancy is notably higher than in fly over places.

exabrial 4y ago

This is so delusional it's laughable. My parents have left their car doors unlocked, their house wide open, keys on the dash, money in plain sight, for 40+ years. Not once, not even even once, has a theft occurred. Violent crime however is a certain reality in NYC.

woodruffw 4y ago
This is apples and oranges: the article is about death (and violent crimes), not theft. That said, the numbers don't really lie: New York (the state, including the city) ranks lowest in burglaries per capita[1]. For larceny theft, the state is also towards the bottom[2]. Those are state numbers, of course, but almost half of the state lives in the city. [1]: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-most-burglaries-in-the-us.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-most-burglaries-in-t... [2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/232583/larceny-theft-rate-in-the-us-by-state/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/232583/larceny-theft-rat...
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  Why not use NYC data? Seems less Apples to Oranges.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    Because I was too lazy to pull CompStat[1]. But here you go: * NYC recorded 6,486 burglaries in 2021, for a population of 8.38 million. That's 77.39 burglaries per 100,000 people, which makes the city's burglary rate lower than the rest of the state. * The city recorded 18,862 grand larcenies in 2021, for the same population. That's 225.08 larcenies per 100,000 people, which is also lower than the rest of the state. Both burglaries and larceny are up this year, significantly. But even if they double, NYC will still be well below national and state averages. Edit: Correcting myself: the final statistics[2] for robbery in 2021 show 12811 robberies, for a final rate of 152.88. That's still a fraction of NY state's burglary rate, which is the lowest in the nation. For grand larceny it's 487.71, which is also still below both state and national averages (by two thirds). [1]: https://compstat.nypdonline.org https://compstat.nypdonline.org [2]: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/historical-crime-data/seven-major-felony-offenses-2000-2021.pdf https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_...

Proven 4y ago

systemvoltage 4y ago

I am curious, on surface it is appealing to use per capita numbers including the central point in the original article, but, what do you think about 1) The density of people is vastly different between some small wrecked town in Missouri vs. NYC 2) Yes, fewer X/capita, but does that really matter when you witness, experience living in an overall dangerous (absolute, not per capita) place that the chance of a dangerous activity happening within 5 blocks of your current position in NYC is far more? Shouldn't we also consider the density of people and exposure to crime? What good is it to live in a place where you're surrounded by crime in close proximity? Kowloon walled city [1] probably had less per capita crime as an extreme example of population density. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

paulpauper 4y ago

This is yet another one of those counterintuitive findings. Similar to the UK being poorer than the poorer state in the US. Rural areas tend to have a lot of homelessness , violence, addiction, and other problems and not enough police. The notion that blue states are secular and degenerate and red rural areas are exemplars of morality and salubrity are wrong. Both urban and rural areas have problems.

jethro_tell 4y ago
I split my time between a rural town and an urban center. I think the murder rate is higher per 100k in the smaller area but they don't really report or have the means to effectively confirm a murder, I've seen multiple people in the last decade die of extremely unusual circumstances that were ruled suicide or accident. A man with both hands taped together inside a sleeping bag that 'shot himself in the head' A man that was 'accidentally' hit in the back of the head with a metal baseball bat. Over the last decade that I've been here, someone has died in an extremely suspicious way and there are never any reported homicides. Yet if you calculate those deaths out per 100k/year the rate is much higher than the urban area I spend time in. Yet everyone in the rural area is afraid of the dangerous city. In the end, my guess is that a lot of rural areas don't have the same quality of reporting or police presents that a city can afford.
political12345 4y ago

gojomo 4y ago

There's a ton of fishy things in this methodology. To borrow from my Twitter comments (https://twitter.com/gojomo/status/1534554504275714051 https://twitter.com/gojomo/status/1534554504275714051) when this article was new: I'm open to the idea NYC safer than its reputation; I appreciate NYC a lot, and live in another city, San Francisco, with a 'meaner' rep than I think true/fair. But, there's a bunch of things that make me suspicious of the main graph/rankings: (1) Leaving out suicide & drug ODs. These vary a lot by region, so whether a region creates motive & opportunity to throw your life away is a relevant 'safeness' indicator, for most people. (2) Leaving out "accidental poisonings" & "falls". These may hide violence & other dangerous living conditions, especially in dense cities, or marginal communities, where many simply don't bother to report to authorities every assault - but do still have to seek medical care for an ‘accident’. People in "small town America" die of these things too, so why shouldn't a 'safeness' metric include them? (3) The author uses a vague catchall exclusion category "sequelae of external causes of morbidity and mortality" that risks hiding relevant dangers, including even aftereffects of earlier violent-injuries, depending on coding standards of exact/immediate cause-of-death. (4) For the widely-forwarded horizontal bar-graph titled "America’s Safest Metro Areas, but not all the analyses, the author uses the whole "New York-Newark, NY-NJ-PA" metro. The nearest part of PA to NYC seems to be Delaware Water Gap, 80 miles/1h40m away! So this winds up including a lot of 'small towns' & suburbs, not really "NYC" itself. Altogether, when there's this many footnotes about a custom & perhaps idiosyncratic-to-the-author definition of "external causes", there's reason for pause before shouting a pleasingly-contrarian result from the rooftops. I asked the Bloomberg author for details of the ICD-10 codes used in his custom definitions – https://twitter.com/gojomo/status/1534624384102461440 https://twitter.com/gojomo/status/1534624384102461440 – but he did not respond.

user3939382 4y ago

Nope. Just moved from 15 years in Upper East Side. People that should be in an insane asylum are walking around everywhere. One of these guys was recently walking around daily attacking random people unprovoked. And this is in an expensive area of the city. Go walk around 86th btwn Lex and 3rd at night and let me know what your study says then. NYC is dangerous, filthy, and extremely expensive. Every day I’m thankful I’m out of there.

halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
I lived in UES from 2016 - 2019 around 77th and 2nd. Anybody there during that time can remember the "Spitting Lady" who lived around the area and would literally spit on passer-bys, scream at the top of her lungs for hours on end and who also had a son with mental illness who would act as muscle for her/intimidate people who dared mess with her. The point is NYC still has big city problems (one could argue the biggest, because it is the biggest), especially around homelessness and how to correctly provide care for them. That does not mean NYC is not safe. I have never felt safer living in both Manhattan and Queens, as opposed to the Bay Area or living in Chicago. Also this fascination with NYC and it's trash situation is such a tired and frankly disingenuous dig at the city. While it is expensive, no argue there, it is not dangerous or filthy. You'd think after having lived there for 15 years you'd have some pride in becoming a New Yorker (lord knows I do and weep for the fact I no longer live there) but maybe the city is better off without you.
- loh 4y ago
  I'm like 90% sure I was spit on by this woman during a week long business trip in 2018. I ignored it and kept walking. Figured she just didn't like the cut of my jib or something, but I guess it makes sense that it'd be a regular occurrence and I feel slightly less bad about it now.
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- LecroJS 4y ago

IceHegel 4y ago

I live in NY. Most people in NY will not agree with this article. This is not because sensationalist media has successfully tricked them into thinking there is more crime than there is, but because they have directly experienced the rise in crime in their daily lives.

drewcoo 4y ago
> This is not because sensationalist media has successfully tricked them into thinking there is more crime than there is . . . it's because they never leave the metro area or even consider conditions anywhere else. That was my experience living there, anyway. A glaring blindness to anything not NY, where everything happens.
whimsicalism 4y ago
Just like most people would say that living conditions have gotten worse in the past 50 years. People will say all sorts of kooky things based on vibes.
halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
Crime is up across the entire country, especially in large urban metros. That being said NYC is still incredibly safe relative to its size. New Yorkers need some perspective. I'm writing from Chicago after having moved from NYC last year.

c_o_n_v_e_x 4y ago

Publication owned by former Mayor of New York city publishes article that states "New York City is a lot safer than Small-Town America." No conflict of interest here.

xbar 4y ago

I am glad this was posted in Opinion on Bloomberg. Drugs, cars, suicide, falls, and murder kill rural folks more than New Yorkers. Drugs and cars seem to be the outsized killers, based on the data provided. I would like to see the data about where people died, not where they lived, as part of these measurements. It might not tell you where to live, but it would tell you where not to go.

Justsignedup 4y ago

Whats important to note here: NYC has a FUCKTON OF PEOPLE. And crime isn't uniformaly spread among it all. Some small sub-sections could be accounting for dispraportionately more than others. So with both of those things, the liklihood of a crime happening is very high. But not per 100k people. That's the big difference. If there is 1 shooting per 100k people, and there are 5 million people around, that's 50 shootings. Vs if you have only 10,000 people around. At 10,000 people, you might see a shooting every 5 years, but proportionately that's double the NYC rate. That's where the visibility vs reality is so counter-intuitive. Also interestingly enough, I see A LOT of homeless (I work near a shelter). And they are indeed crazy looking. But honestly the worst they do is yell at you, and often its because they haven't had real human contact in months. Just imagine being isolated inside a massive crowd.

webshit2 4y ago
I just replace "something happened in nyc" with "something happened in Wyoming or Alaska or North Dakota or South Dakota or Montana or Maine or Nebraska" when looking at Fox News headlines about how this city is apparently imploding.

betwixthewires 4y ago

Is it against HN rules to just flat out call bullshit on an article?