5 ms·

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

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
  - busterarm 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        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 2y ago
        > 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.
- rsanek 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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-arlington-virginia-became-the-safest-place-in-america https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-11-18/how-ar...
nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
[flagged]
- bdangubic 2y ago
  nice comment to make every here know you may have seen NYC on a postcard once or twice in your life :)
- vundercind 2y ago
  I will believe this if you show me the stats. You can use homicide rates, since they're hard to fake or badly under-report, and since many of the other stats crime stats also look pretty good for NYC and I expect you'll dismiss them as extremely incorrect—and it's not unreasonable to worry that they might be, so, you can just use the homicide rates. Maybe one "scary" big city is managing to do hide far-worse homicide rates than they actually have. Are a bunch of them? Maybe, I guess, I doubt it but maybe. If a bunch of them are successfully hiding a lot of murders, though—are towns and small or mid-sized cities in poorer states just unable to hide theirs as effectively, since they are often really high? Of course, you do see more crime with higher density and with a higher proportion of travel on foot rather than by highway. That doesn't necessarily equate to higher risk.
  - lofenfew 2y ago
    maybe crimes besides homicides affect people as well? Like, I dunno, burglary, say.
    - vundercind 2y ago
      Homicides are useful because if you use anything else the "nuh uh, it's impossible that (for example) NYC is safer than lots of other places" contingent will just point out (correctly!) that there are massive problems with crime stat collection and so the ones in the statistically-not-that-bad big cities must be faked [EDIT: or, at least, very inaccurate for other reasons] and the ones in the statistically-worse smaller cities and towns are simply not, or are less, faked (this part doesn't necessarily follow, but they're not wrong that it might be true) Homicides are harder to hide, and are far less likely to go unreported, than other crimes. The other useful route is victimization surveys. They introduce other issues, but the trade-off is well worth it for evading stats-juking or underreporting. Not a cure-all depending on the topic[1] but pretty good. I believe you'll also find NYC and some other perceived-by-many as especially-risky cities fall off the higher part of top-crime-city lists with this metric applied, when we lower the bar of what we're calling a "city" to include small and mid-sized ones. Here's a fun one (check the study linked near the top if you want the source—the article's kinda ass, but the charts are handy) that attempts to use per-capita cost of crime to sort of normalize for overall severity of crime ("is double the overall crime rate really worse if 100% of those are pickpocketing and 100% of the 'lower'-crime city crimes are murder?", to illustrate the problem by exaggerated example) and does include smaller cities (broken out from the 300ish ones the study classifies as "large"): https://thehill.com/homenews/nexstar_media_wire/4366668-these-cities-and-towns-are-most-dangerous-in-the-us-study-finds/ https://thehill.com/homenews/nexstar_media_wire/4366668-thes... (Some large cities are very dangerous and have crime problems! This source confirms that and I do not deny it! The goofy part is that, if you live in certain places and around certain sorts of people, they'll get super-worried about you when travel to ones that simply aren't that bad, and these same folks would never think to worry if you tell them you're visiting, say, Saginaw, MI, or Pine Bluff, AR, but, apparently, they should worry—hell, this whole illustrative exercise probably plays out in Saginaw regularly, I guarantee there are people there who tell their families "hey, cool news, I'm going to NYC for a week" and many of their family members get really worried about their safety) [1] Picking up on sexual assaults with victimization surveys can be especially tricky. There are two main factors at play, one of which is simply that people are a less likely to report a sexual assault even in an anonymous poll than they are other crimes, and the other is that you'll get super-different results if you ask people whether they've been the victim of a sexual assault or rape, versus asking them whether they've experienced something that, as described, definitely legally qualifies as a sexual assault or rape—that is, a lot more people have factually experienced something that qualifies as SA or rape, than regard themselves as having been victims of those crimes, so... which thing are you trying to capture? Incidence rate of behavior that qualifies, or rate at which people regard themselves as being victims of that behavior? You need a different approach for each.
mrguyorama 2y ago
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.it%2Fh9xjamz942jz.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3Db2bb83f29289e75e6933e8007b964028bdd2e2f6 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.

busterarm 2y ago

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 2y ago
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.
- busterarm 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        > 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.
rsanek 2y ago
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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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-arlington-virginia-became-the-safest-place-in-america https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-11-18/how-ar...

nyarlathotep_ 2y ago

[flagged]

bdangubic 2y ago
nice comment to make every here know you may have seen NYC on a postcard once or twice in your life :)
vundercind 2y ago
I will believe this if you show me the stats. You can use homicide rates, since they're hard to fake or badly under-report, and since many of the other stats crime stats also look pretty good for NYC and I expect you'll dismiss them as extremely incorrect—and it's not unreasonable to worry that they might be, so, you can just use the homicide rates. Maybe one "scary" big city is managing to do hide far-worse homicide rates than they actually have. Are a bunch of them? Maybe, I guess, I doubt it but maybe. If a bunch of them are successfully hiding a lot of murders, though—are towns and small or mid-sized cities in poorer states just unable to hide theirs as effectively, since they are often really high? Of course, you do see more crime with higher density and with a higher proportion of travel on foot rather than by highway. That doesn't necessarily equate to higher risk.
- lofenfew 2y ago
  maybe crimes besides homicides affect people as well? Like, I dunno, burglary, say.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    Homicides are useful because if you use anything else the "nuh uh, it's impossible that (for example) NYC is safer than lots of other places" contingent will just point out (correctly!) that there are massive problems with crime stat collection and so the ones in the statistically-not-that-bad big cities must be faked [EDIT: or, at least, very inaccurate for other reasons] and the ones in the statistically-worse smaller cities and towns are simply not, or are less, faked (this part doesn't necessarily follow, but they're not wrong that it might be true) Homicides are harder to hide, and are far less likely to go unreported, than other crimes. The other useful route is victimization surveys. They introduce other issues, but the trade-off is well worth it for evading stats-juking or underreporting. Not a cure-all depending on the topic[1] but pretty good. I believe you'll also find NYC and some other perceived-by-many as especially-risky cities fall off the higher part of top-crime-city lists with this metric applied, when we lower the bar of what we're calling a "city" to include small and mid-sized ones. Here's a fun one (check the study linked near the top if you want the source—the article's kinda ass, but the charts are handy) that attempts to use per-capita cost of crime to sort of normalize for overall severity of crime ("is double the overall crime rate really worse if 100% of those are pickpocketing and 100% of the 'lower'-crime city crimes are murder?", to illustrate the problem by exaggerated example) and does include smaller cities (broken out from the 300ish ones the study classifies as "large"): https://thehill.com/homenews/nexstar_media_wire/4366668-these-cities-and-towns-are-most-dangerous-in-the-us-study-finds/ https://thehill.com/homenews/nexstar_media_wire/4366668-thes... (Some large cities are very dangerous and have crime problems! This source confirms that and I do not deny it! The goofy part is that, if you live in certain places and around certain sorts of people, they'll get super-worried about you when travel to ones that simply aren't that bad, and these same folks would never think to worry if you tell them you're visiting, say, Saginaw, MI, or Pine Bluff, AR, but, apparently, they should worry—hell, this whole illustrative exercise probably plays out in Saginaw regularly, I guarantee there are people there who tell their families "hey, cool news, I'm going to NYC for a week" and many of their family members get really worried about their safety) [1] Picking up on sexual assaults with victimization surveys can be especially tricky. There are two main factors at play, one of which is simply that people are a less likely to report a sexual assault even in an anonymous poll than they are other crimes, and the other is that you'll get super-different results if you ask people whether they've been the victim of a sexual assault or rape, versus asking them whether they've experienced something that, as described, definitely legally qualifies as a sexual assault or rape—that is, a lot more people have factually experienced something that qualifies as SA or rape, than regard themselves as having been victims of those crimes, so... which thing are you trying to capture? Incidence rate of behavior that qualifies, or rate at which people regard themselves as being victims of that behavior? You need a different approach for each.

mrguyorama 2y ago

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.it%2Fh9xjamz942jz.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3Db2bb83f29289e75e6933e8007b964028bdd2e2f6 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.