I know the output of these reports is difficult to interpret but see [1]. The top decile of per-capita violent deaths are rural counties, not urban ones.
1: https://wisqars.cdc.gov:8443/cdcMapFramework/output/m5886273...
Try this:
Go find a crime map site, pick a big city and show homicides over the last year.
Then go to the racial dot map and see how it compares to the census of that locale.
I have a feeling if you did the same test but instead of “crime” you did “wealth percentile” you’d probably end up with the same results in the United States though unfortunately.
Not a lot of well off minority neighborhoods throughout the country and the wealth disparity even with all the poor white people is very real.
Believe it or not, this exact question has been studied pretty intensively for decades.
The predictive value of race is much higher than the predictive value of socioeconomic status.
His conclusion is that on a county-by-county level in the US, race is the strongest predictor of homicide rates, with rates of single-motherhood being next strongest. Poverty is a reasonable predictor, but weaker than these and several others.
I read this closely a couple years ago, but only skimmed it now to remind myself of the conclusions. I'd be interested to hear peoples' thoughts on whether his statistical techniques are appropriately applied. I recall it was was convincing to me at the time.
Now I have lost track of the exact scope of ‘socioeconomic status’, but i don’t think that being poor/uneducated/financially insecure explains it all either. West Virginia is the epitome of low socioeconomic status, but violent crime is relatively low.
My basic thinking is that these communities do not have a healthy, trusting relationship with law enforcement. The cause for that is complex of course, but the net effect ties back to the OP. If law enforcement isn’t a reliable or trusted resource, a community will fall back to vigilante/mob justice. Without the resources of a court and prison system to remove people from a community, that justice is going to come in the form of violence. This of course creates a negative feedback loop with law enforcement, exacerbating the problem.
On the upside, this problem might actually be easier to solve.
With that, you don’t need to centrally ‘decide’ anything. I think folks would generally observe patterns and come to similar conclusions. Honestly it’s probably the same way the ‘blue code’ develops...theres no meeting, just patterns. It’s not an absolute model, police do get called (and fired) all the time despite this.
Doesn’t really matter what i think at the end of the day and im grossly oversimplifying most of it, but it is a handy framework that explains a lot for me.
https://crimeresearch.org/2017/04/number-murders-county-54-u...
_Anything_ measured in that way would show densely populated area vastly outnumbering rural areas, perhaps with the exclusion of things that essentially don't exist in cites, such as "number of farms per capita per square mile".
The measure appears to be concocted specifically for Lying With Statistics™.
That is, a dense urban area would have more face-to-face interactions than a sparse rural one. Given two areas with equal levels of per-capita violence, it would then follow that the more sparsely populated one would have more violence per face-to-face interaction, not less.
Murder-hectares per square capita? Murder-capitas per hectare? I'm not actually sure how the dimensional analysis works out.
I'm sure there are those, too, but IIRC in most violent crime the attacker and the victim know each other. Do people have substantially bigger social circles in cities?
Why per capita per square mile instead of per capita? Why do the miles enter into it? Because of more interactions? I'd like to see just the numbers per capita. I suspect they're fairly close.
Given 1 homicide in 100k for 100sq miles called "rural" vs 1 homicide in 100k for 5 sq miles called "urban", your odds of being in proximity of a homicide are much higher in the urban area. 20 times more likely.
This doesn't stand up. Crime statistics are measured after the crimes happen; whatever effect might be due to proximity has already taken place.
Consider: in your example you say two places have equal per-capita homicide rates but one is 20x denser. It follows that the denser area will have 20x more people "in proximity" to any given homicide, and therefore that P(victim|proximity) must be 20x lower compared to the rural place.
The way you've done the math only makes sense if everyone "in proximity" of a homicide was equally likely to be a victim, but given equal per-capita rates that can't be the case.
https://crimeresearch.org/2017/04/number-murders-county-54-u...
If you put a million people in a city and 100 of them die of a flu, everyone screams epidemic. You spread those same people out over all the small towns in a state, and 200 of them die, it's just fine.
Because, I suspect, we often associate statistics with a location rather than a cross section of society. We think "someone in my town was murdered", not "the murder rate is 1/250,000".