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> I'm sure Brussels is super safe if you use Mogadishu as the point of comparisons I believe their point was that Brussels is “super safe” compared to Chicago.
by rbanffy 10mo ago
> I'm sure Brussels is super safe if you use Mogadishu as the point of comparisons
I believe their point was that Brussels is “super safe” compared to Chicago. 67 times fewer gun incidents is quite a lot.
I live in Dublin, Ireland, which is a lot smaller than Brussels, and when there is a shooting it gets on the news. You can imagine how amused I was coming from São Paulo that a full-on gang war was going on when I arrived here and 4 people had been shot in the previous year.
A friend of mine who also came from São Paulo, a trauma surgeon, had to change specialty here because there simply isn’t enough work.
- joe_mamba 10mo agoLike I argumented before, comparisons with random high crime cities across the pond are in bad faith, which is why i proposed sticking only to EU cities to make the comparison fair, and Brussels does fairly bad at that level. If you insist to go this route, you can definitely find cities even in the US with less violent crime than Brussels.
- rbanffy 10mo agoDo you think Chicago is an outlier compared to other large cities in the US? Would you like to provide a comparison including other large cities?
- wookmaster 10mo agoWhy is comparing major cities in the US on a thread about someone leaving the US for Brussels bad faith?
- mothballed 10mo agoBecause it ignores the fact a white European, the vast vast majority of Belgium, won't actually experience that kind of homicide rate in the USA if you pluck them out of Belgium and dumped them there. If you look at places in US with similar white European demographics (New Hampshire at <2 per 100k) the homicide rate isn't that much worse than Belgium (~1.2 per 100k). The best predictor of being a victim of violence in the USA is to be black, the ~second best predictor is to be in a state with a high proportion of black people. If you are in a state that is ~as white as Belgium, the rate goes way way down.
- wookmaster 10mo agoThanks I see your point there, though the school shooting reply above is the opposite from what I can gather.
- joe_mamba 10mo agoWell said. After reading your comment and ruminating on it a bit, I think people handwaive the violent crime in Brussels since native Belgians (and possibly other well off immigrants) aren't very likely to live in Brussels city that's only 22% native Belgian and 78% foreign born. I expect small cities and towns in the suburbs, where native Belgians are a majority, to have virtually zero violent crime, which would flatten out the crime spike of Brussels into good looking national averages.
- tptacek 10mo agoPeople need to take the name Chicago out of their mouths. If a message board thread is a poker game, bet the bank when someone tries to make a political argument using "Chicago" that they've never set foot here. Someone who grew up in Brussels would be approximately as safe in Chicago as they would anywhere in the United States --- less safe than in Brussels, because of overall automobile and firearms deaths in America, but no less safe than in any major city. (In fact, your life expectancy in Cook County is several years higher than in the rural south.) The gun violence in Chicago is tightly constrained to places and populations unfamiliar to the median Belgian. Chicago is a city of neighborhoods and structurally segregated by almost a century of redlining and "urban renewal" that created hyperconcentrated pockets of crime. It's a human tragedy and fully worth dunking on, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with how safe a visitor would be to the city. (Chicago is also not even in the top 10 in US cities by index crimes, but whatever).