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> the crime seemed to follow and exacerbate the problem Did it? Not in NYC. Crime is very low; it's arguably one of the safest places to be in the country.

jvanderbot 2y ago
> seemed to In GP comment - sorry too late to edit.
whythre 2y ago
Accurate crime statistics are… let’s say, ‘discouraged,’ by the NYPD and the Mayor’s Office.
- zdragnar 2y ago
  Combine that the culture of not snitching, and you get wildly bad crime data, fueling all sorts of silly internet arguments, bad politics and bad social science.
  - wolverine876 2y ago
    So how do you know the truth? Maybe crime is even lower. I'm not sure how the no-snitch culture lowers the crime rate; it would seem to lower the conviction rate.
    - zdragnar 2y ago
      It's hard to convict if the crying never gets reported in the first place.
- warcher 2y ago
  In the end the murder rate cannot be fudged, and it is quite favorable. https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/cities-with-most-murders https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/cities-wi...
  - raydev 2y ago
    There's more to "violent crime" than just murder.
    - reducesuffering 2y ago
      Of course there is, however murder is the best simple proxy because it's the most severe and least likely to be disputed that it's fudged. So it stands in well for quick internet comments. When you get into a multi-pronged analysis of 5+ crime metrics, and how you factor each into "safety" and what metric and places go more underreported, etc. well, you have yourself a research paper...
    - wolverine876 2y ago
      What do you conclude from that? Maybe the other crime is even lower.
- ajross 2y ago
  You're going to need to elaborate beyond "let's say". What you wrote is basically just a conspiracy theory. In fact crime statistics reporting is an extremely mature field with well-understood methods and comparable data, and nothing one particular administration can do it really going to impact things very much. Basically, if this was such a great trick for Adams to have invented, why didn't it occur to Bloomberg or Giuliani or Koch? In fact NYC is a very safe city. That it's inconvenient for you to believe that doesn't change the facts.
  - fosk 2y ago
    In places like San Francisco it is an understood phenomenon that crime is underreported because nobody will investigate it anyways so why bother[1]. [1] https://nationalpolice.org/main/not-letting-cops-enforce-laws-leads-to-witnesses-not-reporting-crimes-which-leads-to-crime-statistics-becoming-misleading/ https://nationalpolice.org/main/not-letting-cops-enforce-law...
    - ajross 2y ago
      Your citation for an "understood phenomenon" is a position paper from a lobby group. That's the point: the facts don't match the policy you want, so in our post-reality world the job of lobbyists is to invent arguments to allow people to ignore facts. As folks elsewhere in the thread point out: murder rates don't work with this analysis (you can't "underreport" a body) and murder rates show the same effects. Is it so hard to believe that your political aliance is just wrong on this? Would it really be such a terrible thing if, y'know, US cities were safe?
      - fosk 2y ago
        Here is another source [1] that draws the conclusion that "approximately half of crimes are not reported to the police". Here is yet another source from the U.S. Department of Justice [2]: "During the period from 2006 to 2010, 52% of all violent victimizations, or an annual average of 3,382,200 violent victimizations, were not reported to the police.". Realistically speaking it is hard to measure unreported crimes given that by definition they are - after all - unreported. And yet the fact that some data is not collected or it is hard to collect, doesn't mean that the data doesn't exist. > Is it so hard to believe that your political aliance is just wrong on this? I could be asking you the same question, based on your stance. [1] - https://www.csustan.edu/sites/default/files/groups/University%20Honors%20Program/Journals_two/solorzano_yesenia_.pdf https://www.csustan.edu/sites/default/files/groups/Universit... [2] - https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/vnrp0610.pdf https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/vnrp0610.pdf
- Fomite 2y ago
  Accurate crime statistics are discouraged by every police department and Mayor's Office in this country.
  - bryanrasmussen 2y ago
    What if there was some place with no crime? No wait, then they would discourage it because there would be no need to fund the police and what the hell does the Mayor do all day.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      If it was a large enough city, you could convincingly argue that there being no crime means crime prevention is massively overfunded and/or excessive in nature.
AndyNemmity 2y ago
Saying NYC being one of the safest places to be in the country is why LLMs will never be accurate. People will just say anything no matter how irrational it is.
- reducesuffering 2y ago
  Want to back that up with some data? NYC is half the per capita murder rate of the US. What swath of places do you think are safer such that "one of the safest places" for NYC is inaccurate? On >250k population list, NYC is #20/100 safest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... On a 100k to 250k list, NYC is above average safety.
  - AndyNemmity 2y ago
    The statement that "NYC is one of the safest places in the country" and the relevance of per capita crime rates are two different discussions. When we say a place is "the safest," we're referring to the absolute level of safety. Per capita crime rates, while useful for comparing the likelihood of crime between areas with different population sizes, don't determine the absolute safety of a place. They normalize crime data by population to show relative safety, which is a different metric.
    - reducesuffering 2y ago
      > When we say a place is "the safest," we're referring to the absolute level of safety. Idk who you think "we" is. It's not in my definition of safety, nor probably the general populace to think of Stockton, California as "safer" than NYC, just because Stockton had 50 murders a year compared to NYC's 240... Because Stockton has a 17.77 murder rate per 100k, and NYC 3 per 100k. You bet your ass you'd be "safer", as in less likely to get shot or stabbed to death, living in NYC.
      - AndyNemmity 2y ago
        NYC hasn't had as little as 240 murders in a year since murder data was recorded.
IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago
"Crime is very low" Murder may be low. Are assaults low? Petty theft? What about pedestrian sentiment when walking the street? Not all crime is reported and not all threats are crimes yet threats will certainly cause someone to feel unsafe.
- wolverine876 2y ago
  You can look up the answers to some of the questions. Do you have any factual basis for your claims? > Not all crime is reported and not all threats are crimes yet threats will certainly cause someone to feel unsafe. What does that mean? We don't know anything about anything? Then maybe crime is even lower than I think. Everyone feels threatened all the time? What basis do you have for saying that crime is _____ (what?)? It's all fabricated so far.
  - monero-xmr 2y ago
    The problem is it’s hard to get anything other than anecdata when discussing things that don’t come into macro statistics. I live in a large Democrat-dominated city, I have very deep connections and roots all around, and casual mentions of petty crime are common. I have observed a lot of shoplifting and I’m only in retail stores so often. There is certainly an attitude that some types of crime just occur and no one will stop it. > In its annual survey, BJS asks crime victims whether they reported their crime to police. It found that in 2022, only 41.5% of violent crimes and 31.8% of household property crimes were reported to authorities. BJS notes that there are many reasons why crime might not be reported, including fear of reprisal or of “getting the offender in trouble,” a feeling that police “would not or could not do anything to help,” or a belief that the crime is “a personal issue or too trivial to report.” > Most of the crimes that are reported to police, meanwhile, are not solved, at least based on an FBI measure known as the clearance rate. That’s the share of cases each year that are closed, or “cleared,” through the arrest, charging and referral of a suspect for prosecution, or due to “exceptional” circumstances such as the death of a suspect or a victim’s refusal to cooperate with a prosecution. In 2022, police nationwide cleared 36.7% of violent crimes that were reported to them and 12.1% of the property crimes that came to their attention. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-data-says-about-crime-in-the-us/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-...
bryanrasmussen 2y ago
I gotta say this subthread is weird, our society has pretty much decided to evaluate such issues as safety, worker happiness, gender equality and so forth on the basis of statistics, and all these people here are just saying no, it doesn't matter that statistically New York is safer without providing any argument why the statistics are wrong (there are a couple people who say things like the population size skews statistics but that's like the premise of an argument, not an actual argument), according to these folks it just is the case that New York is much less safe and that's it buddy! I would expect to see a mathematical argument as to why the statistics are wrong, size of population skews the statistics, cool. How does that work and why has it made New York seem safer when you contend it isn't!? There are different kinds of crime than murder - ok, show the stats as to why people suffer more from other crime in New York than the rest of the country! You're more likely to see a crime in New York than in other places with more crime because there are more people, ok sounds like a cool statistical "paradox", show your work. This is HN and all that stuff! I mean it is just a weird little discussion here, reminds me of twitter, although with more text and admittedly more grammatical correctness.
- wpm 2y ago
  It’s clear to me: NYC doesn’t feel safe. And while subjective experience is important, it’s hard to argue with a position someone didn’t logic themselves into. I live in Chicago and it’s much the same. I hear about carjackings and muggings and all sorts yet the one thing I see and experience nearly every single time I leave the house is being nearly run over by some impatient wanker in a car. I don’t feel that other stuff because I yanked the IV drip of fear-news-weather garbage media out of my arm and that’s really the only thing feeding this crap to people. Most big cities are the safest they have been in history. Someone wants people to feel otherwise. I wonder why.
  - wolverine876 2y ago
    > It’s clear to me: NYC doesn’t feel safe. What is that based on? Is there a survey? When I've been in NYC, people seem to feel very safe and relaxed, 24/7 (of course, in the city that never sleeps).
Supermancho 2y ago
> Not in NYC. That is now. NYC was famously crime ridden for at least a century. Today, just as in London, crime past a certain value or a non injury car accident, is not investigated.
- mgce 2y ago
  I think this discussion is about today. I don't follow your reference to old history or how that affects the general discussion?
- wolverine876 2y ago
  > NYC was famously crime ridden for at least a century. Where does that come from? All of the US had high crime rates from ~1970s to 2000 (as a rough guess). NYC doesn't stand out, afaik; some other cities had higher crime rates. > Today, just as in London, crime past a certain value or a non injury car accident, is not investigated. What makes you say that has changed from the past?
FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
It is NOW. You missed out when NYC almost went bankrupt in the 1970's and was a hellscape through the 1980's... They did a great job bringing it back from the brink, but it was very very bad. https://www.city-journal.org/article/how-new-york-became-safe-the-full-story https://www.city-journal.org/article/how-new-york-became-saf...

jvanderbot 2y ago

> seemed to In GP comment - sorry too late to edit.

whythre 2y ago

Accurate crime statistics are… let’s say, ‘discouraged,’ by the NYPD and the Mayor’s Office.

zdragnar 2y ago
Combine that the culture of not snitching, and you get wildly bad crime data, fueling all sorts of silly internet arguments, bad politics and bad social science.
- wolverine876 2y ago
  So how do you know the truth? Maybe crime is even lower. I'm not sure how the no-snitch culture lowers the crime rate; it would seem to lower the conviction rate.
  - zdragnar 2y ago
    It's hard to convict if the crying never gets reported in the first place.
warcher 2y ago
In the end the murder rate cannot be fudged, and it is quite favorable. https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/cities-with-most-murders https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/cities-wi...
- raydev 2y ago
  There's more to "violent crime" than just murder.
  - reducesuffering 2y ago
    Of course there is, however murder is the best simple proxy because it's the most severe and least likely to be disputed that it's fudged. So it stands in well for quick internet comments. When you get into a multi-pronged analysis of 5+ crime metrics, and how you factor each into "safety" and what metric and places go more underreported, etc. well, you have yourself a research paper...
  - wolverine876 2y ago
    What do you conclude from that? Maybe the other crime is even lower.
ajross 2y ago
You're going to need to elaborate beyond "let's say". What you wrote is basically just a conspiracy theory. In fact crime statistics reporting is an extremely mature field with well-understood methods and comparable data, and nothing one particular administration can do it really going to impact things very much. Basically, if this was such a great trick for Adams to have invented, why didn't it occur to Bloomberg or Giuliani or Koch? In fact NYC is a very safe city. That it's inconvenient for you to believe that doesn't change the facts.
- fosk 2y ago
  In places like San Francisco it is an understood phenomenon that crime is underreported because nobody will investigate it anyways so why bother[1]. [1] https://nationalpolice.org/main/not-letting-cops-enforce-laws-leads-to-witnesses-not-reporting-crimes-which-leads-to-crime-statistics-becoming-misleading/ https://nationalpolice.org/main/not-letting-cops-enforce-law...
  - ajross 2y ago
    Your citation for an "understood phenomenon" is a position paper from a lobby group. That's the point: the facts don't match the policy you want, so in our post-reality world the job of lobbyists is to invent arguments to allow people to ignore facts. As folks elsewhere in the thread point out: murder rates don't work with this analysis (you can't "underreport" a body) and murder rates show the same effects. Is it so hard to believe that your political aliance is just wrong on this? Would it really be such a terrible thing if, y'know, US cities were safe?
    - fosk 2y ago
      Here is another source [1] that draws the conclusion that "approximately half of crimes are not reported to the police". Here is yet another source from the U.S. Department of Justice [2]: "During the period from 2006 to 2010, 52% of all violent victimizations, or an annual average of 3,382,200 violent victimizations, were not reported to the police.". Realistically speaking it is hard to measure unreported crimes given that by definition they are - after all - unreported. And yet the fact that some data is not collected or it is hard to collect, doesn't mean that the data doesn't exist. > Is it so hard to believe that your political aliance is just wrong on this? I could be asking you the same question, based on your stance. [1] - https://www.csustan.edu/sites/default/files/groups/University%20Honors%20Program/Journals_two/solorzano_yesenia_.pdf https://www.csustan.edu/sites/default/files/groups/Universit... [2] - https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/vnrp0610.pdf https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/vnrp0610.pdf
Fomite 2y ago
Accurate crime statistics are discouraged by every police department and Mayor's Office in this country.
- bryanrasmussen 2y ago
  What if there was some place with no crime? No wait, then they would discourage it because there would be no need to fund the police and what the hell does the Mayor do all day.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    If it was a large enough city, you could convincingly argue that there being no crime means crime prevention is massively overfunded and/or excessive in nature.

AndyNemmity 2y ago

Saying NYC being one of the safest places to be in the country is why LLMs will never be accurate. People will just say anything no matter how irrational it is.

reducesuffering 2y ago
Want to back that up with some data? NYC is half the per capita murder rate of the US. What swath of places do you think are safer such that "one of the safest places" for NYC is inaccurate? On >250k population list, NYC is #20/100 safest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... On a 100k to 250k list, NYC is above average safety.
- AndyNemmity 2y ago
  The statement that "NYC is one of the safest places in the country" and the relevance of per capita crime rates are two different discussions. When we say a place is "the safest," we're referring to the absolute level of safety. Per capita crime rates, while useful for comparing the likelihood of crime between areas with different population sizes, don't determine the absolute safety of a place. They normalize crime data by population to show relative safety, which is a different metric.
  - reducesuffering 2y ago
    > When we say a place is "the safest," we're referring to the absolute level of safety. Idk who you think "we" is. It's not in my definition of safety, nor probably the general populace to think of Stockton, California as "safer" than NYC, just because Stockton had 50 murders a year compared to NYC's 240... Because Stockton has a 17.77 murder rate per 100k, and NYC 3 per 100k. You bet your ass you'd be "safer", as in less likely to get shot or stabbed to death, living in NYC.
    - AndyNemmity 2y ago
      NYC hasn't had as little as 240 murders in a year since murder data was recorded.

IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago

"Crime is very low" Murder may be low. Are assaults low? Petty theft? What about pedestrian sentiment when walking the street? Not all crime is reported and not all threats are crimes yet threats will certainly cause someone to feel unsafe.

wolverine876 2y ago
You can look up the answers to some of the questions. Do you have any factual basis for your claims? > Not all crime is reported and not all threats are crimes yet threats will certainly cause someone to feel unsafe. What does that mean? We don't know anything about anything? Then maybe crime is even lower than I think. Everyone feels threatened all the time? What basis do you have for saying that crime is _____ (what?)? It's all fabricated so far.
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  The problem is it’s hard to get anything other than anecdata when discussing things that don’t come into macro statistics. I live in a large Democrat-dominated city, I have very deep connections and roots all around, and casual mentions of petty crime are common. I have observed a lot of shoplifting and I’m only in retail stores so often. There is certainly an attitude that some types of crime just occur and no one will stop it. > In its annual survey, BJS asks crime victims whether they reported their crime to police. It found that in 2022, only 41.5% of violent crimes and 31.8% of household property crimes were reported to authorities. BJS notes that there are many reasons why crime might not be reported, including fear of reprisal or of “getting the offender in trouble,” a feeling that police “would not or could not do anything to help,” or a belief that the crime is “a personal issue or too trivial to report.” > Most of the crimes that are reported to police, meanwhile, are not solved, at least based on an FBI measure known as the clearance rate. That’s the share of cases each year that are closed, or “cleared,” through the arrest, charging and referral of a suspect for prosecution, or due to “exceptional” circumstances such as the death of a suspect or a victim’s refusal to cooperate with a prosecution. In 2022, police nationwide cleared 36.7% of violent crimes that were reported to them and 12.1% of the property crimes that came to their attention. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-data-says-about-crime-in-the-us/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-...

bryanrasmussen 2y ago

I gotta say this subthread is weird, our society has pretty much decided to evaluate such issues as safety, worker happiness, gender equality and so forth on the basis of statistics, and all these people here are just saying no, it doesn't matter that statistically New York is safer without providing any argument why the statistics are wrong (there are a couple people who say things like the population size skews statistics but that's like the premise of an argument, not an actual argument), according to these folks it just is the case that New York is much less safe and that's it buddy! I would expect to see a mathematical argument as to why the statistics are wrong, size of population skews the statistics, cool. How does that work and why has it made New York seem safer when you contend it isn't!? There are different kinds of crime than murder - ok, show the stats as to why people suffer more from other crime in New York than the rest of the country! You're more likely to see a crime in New York than in other places with more crime because there are more people, ok sounds like a cool statistical "paradox", show your work. This is HN and all that stuff! I mean it is just a weird little discussion here, reminds me of twitter, although with more text and admittedly more grammatical correctness.

wpm 2y ago
It’s clear to me: NYC doesn’t feel safe. And while subjective experience is important, it’s hard to argue with a position someone didn’t logic themselves into. I live in Chicago and it’s much the same. I hear about carjackings and muggings and all sorts yet the one thing I see and experience nearly every single time I leave the house is being nearly run over by some impatient wanker in a car. I don’t feel that other stuff because I yanked the IV drip of fear-news-weather garbage media out of my arm and that’s really the only thing feeding this crap to people. Most big cities are the safest they have been in history. Someone wants people to feel otherwise. I wonder why.
- wolverine876 2y ago
  > It’s clear to me: NYC doesn’t feel safe. What is that based on? Is there a survey? When I've been in NYC, people seem to feel very safe and relaxed, 24/7 (of course, in the city that never sleeps).

Supermancho 2y ago

> Not in NYC. That is now. NYC was famously crime ridden for at least a century. Today, just as in London, crime past a certain value or a non injury car accident, is not investigated.

mgce 2y ago
I think this discussion is about today. I don't follow your reference to old history or how that affects the general discussion?
wolverine876 2y ago
> NYC was famously crime ridden for at least a century. Where does that come from? All of the US had high crime rates from ~1970s to 2000 (as a rough guess). NYC doesn't stand out, afaik; some other cities had higher crime rates. > Today, just as in London, crime past a certain value or a non injury car accident, is not investigated. What makes you say that has changed from the past?

FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago

It is NOW. You missed out when NYC almost went bankrupt in the 1970's and was a hellscape through the 1980's... They did a great job bringing it back from the brink, but it was very very bad. https://www.city-journal.org/article/how-new-york-became-safe-the-full-story https://www.city-journal.org/article/how-new-york-became-saf...