> 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