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ddevault

Meanwhile we've had >1 homicide per day in 2021 in my home city of Philadelphia.

https://controller.phila.gov/philadelphia-audits/mapping-gun...

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I am not a US Citizen and have never lived in the US.

I just finnished watching HBO's "The Wire" and my reaction was Jesus! Does is this really happen?

Yes. The Wire is shockingly true to life. I cannot think of a detail that isn't modeled after a great deal of real life events that play out, over and over, in a loop, in every major American city.

Edit: the McNulty arc in the last season probably doesn't happen particularly often. The alternative, that the murders are never found or investigated, is much more likely. I don't want to say what he does (it would be a spoiler), but yes, that was more character-driven than most of the dynamics on the show.

It's only in small pockets of cities, not evenly distributed among everyone there. If you aren't involved in crime or live in those high crime areas, you'll probably never experience any violence. But yeah, there are parts of Baltimore that are just like what you see on The Wire.

you probably won't get murdered, but if you live in any walkable area of baltimore for a long time it's pretty likely you'll get mugged.

source: everyone I know that's lived there more than five years.

This is wildly inaccurate.

Muggings are uncommon in neighborhoods like locust point,hampden, Roland park, federal hill, charles village, Patterson park, etc.

Even in "rougher" areas of the white l (station north, Remington, Barclay) Muggings are still uncommon

uncommon in the sense that it probably won't happen on a particular day. but it will happen to you eventually if you walk around in the city.

doesn't happen much in roland park, LP, and hampden, but I don't really agree on the others you listed. look at the the crime map with the "robbery - street" filter if you don't believe me. it looks like a population density map. fed in particular has a surprising number of muggings (probably due to drunk idiots by the bars).

>but it will happen to you eventually if you walk around in the city.

It absolutely will not. I've lived in those neighborhoods (A few blocks north of north ave in old goucher) and neither my wife nor I ever had issues with violent crime. Prostitution is another story.

Link to the map?

https://arcgisportal.baltimorepolice.org/publiccrimemap/

see for yourself. in the last three months there's been at least one street robbery in most of the neighborhoods you named. if you look at the last year, they're surprisingly evenly distributed everywhere below university/33rd. I would have agreed with you seven to ten years ago, but things have really gone downhill.

roland park is almost a suburb, very car oriented, and LP is a special case due to its geography (really its connectivity). aside from that you gotta assume anything can happen at any time in baltimore.

>in the last three months there's been at least one street robbery in most of the neighborhoods you named.

You're aware that thousands of people live in these areas right?

> I would have agreed with you seven to ten years ago, but things have really gone downhill.

Do you live in the city? The amount of development + property prices have consistently moved upwards over the last few years

yes, I grew up in baltimore and have lived in/around the city most of my life. I'm very familiar with the neighborhoods we are discussing. the city is much less safe than it was ten years ago, and that is really saying something.

btw I'm not saying it can't be a great place to live or that you should be afraid every time you step outside. just don't believe no one will ever stick a gun in your face. it's a lot more likely than you seem to think.

>just don't believe no one will ever stick a gun in your face

Agree, but I think you're overestimating the likelihood.

Overall thanks for taking the time and best of luck in the future

I've lived in Baltimore for almost a decade now. A large majority of the murders are targeted killings relating to the drug trade. Iirc its why Baltimore has a very high death rate among those who are shot. If you live in the more developed/safer areas it is much more comparable to a normal US city

Essentially. The creator, David Simon, spent 12 years as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun.

Yes. The mass shootings make the national news, usually, but gun violence is so endemic, especially in the poorer parts of town, it often barely makes it in the newspaper.

Philly is bad but let's compare best to best and worst to worst. What is the US state or county with lowest homicide rate? Higher than Norway probably, but by how much? What is the worst in Europe?

> What is the US state or county with lowest homicide rate?

The ones with cold winters and minimal urbanization.

The UK is more urban than US and has a small fraction of the murder rate.

Wyoming?

Alaska is ready and willing to prove you wrong.

Alaska gets all the people who struck out in the lower 48 so of course it's a little more spicy than it should be.

Philadelphia is a city. Pick any city in Norway and you get the same results.

US counties are quite small so it should be easy to find one that has a very low or very high murder rate.

From [0] and[1], in 2018 Norway had a murder rate of about 0.5/100k. South Dakota (the least murder-y state) had a rate of 1.4.

The worst in Europe are the Baltic states. Latvia and Lithuania would be equivalent to middle of the pack US states. Outside the Baltic states, the rest of the EU and UK would be, at worst, just nudging the bottom of the states' rankings or, at best, quite some way below.

Once you get to Turkey and the Balkan states, you are again nudging lowish US numbers. BTW the reason Liechtenstein is an outlier is because it has a population of 38k. So this suggest that one person was murdered there in 2018.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

Irvine, California out of the 100 largest cities. Average of 0.72 homicides per 100,000 people, per year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

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