This sort of thing would be unthinkable in central Moscow and most other large European city centres (the only European city I've ever felt unsafe in is Brussels, and that's still quite different from NYC).
Nothing ruins a good story like facts. That's also why you should always raise before you launch or enter a new market, etc. People are suckers for a story, and our brains are pre-wired to explain phenomena rather than to question them. Once you master that psychology (and manipulation) of people, you'll be better at fundraising - and apparently at journalism as well!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Russia [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
> Either way, it represents a significant decrease over the previous 15 years (in 2001, the homicide rate was 30.5). In 2018, according to Rosstat, there were 7,067 murders, and the homicide rate in Russia fell below the United States for the first time in recent history, falling to 4.9 per 100,000 compared to the US rate of 5.0 per 100,000 in 2018.
A common thing that happens in these comparisons is that people look at the Rosstat statistic that includes attempted murder.
Also, I'm specifically making my point about the major cities. Moscow sees a huge amount of investment of course, and I would expect the same from US cities like NYC or SF.
It's strange because it's exaggerated, and it's exaggerated because it has to be - otherwise nobody would care to read the article (and then nobody would pay for this poor reporter's salary who has to hit certain monthly pageview targets, etc).
If you read something in the news and it sounds really strange, don't take it at face value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
It sounded strange, because all it takes is a few YouTube searches to witness the level of violence that exists in Russia that far exceeds anything you'll see in the US. Russia really is something else in that regard, and if a Russian felt safer at home than in the US, it's simply a product of exaggerated reporting.
If someone living in Munich said that NYC is more dangerous than what they are used to, I wouldn't disagree with them.
The average stats are about the same, but that's as useful a number as the average temperature of the patients in a hospital.
For the places a visitor is likely to go, Russia will definitely feel safer. Crime there is largely pushed out of the densely populated city cores and into the outskirts. In the US, it's the opposite. A downtown core looks (and smells) like a dystopia unimaginable to most citizens of the world. People are always shocked at how terrible the world cities that heard about so much look in person.
Just like you can't compare Western Europe to Japan (it is much more violent in comparison, but again, different demographics).
The US is maybe 50% Europe, 30% Latin America, 8% Asia, 12% Africa, and if you look at the UN intentional homicide tables and take the weighted average by continent, you'll end up with an expected intentional homicide rate of about 5 per 100,000, which is right where the US is.
So stop pretending we are Western Europe - we aren't.
If you combined murder rate + ICU entry rate for both countries due to violent crime, I think the stats would tell quite a different story.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/deliveroo...
My first time on jury duty in nyc the case was armed robbery of a delivery worker to steal his cell phone - this was pre smart phone era, so let's say the phone's value was <$200.
Was a very depressing case tbh. One person at risk of death and another at risk of a long prison term for what was really petty theft (armed robbery makes the punishment much much worse than just petty theft would be).
Similarly, I didn't actually believe it was worth more than $125 to be a few seconds earlier to work this morning, which would be a rational, economic justification for a $125 traffic ticket. Instead, I've driven some 250,000 miles in the past 10 years (thankfully done with the long highway commute that caused most of them), I'd say about half of them were at 5mph over, and I've never received a ticket. I traded a 1:100,000 chance of a ticket against keeping up with the rest of traffic who were also uniformly breaking the law; I'm pretty adept with numbers but I find it difficult to comprehend that scale.
They're trading a tiny, tiny chance of prison time against a $200 phone. The actual percentage of enforcement is irrelevant compared to the justified, reinforced belief that they won't be caught or punished. OP mentioned that as a juror they were depressed at the apparent mandate to sentence someone to years in prison for the petty theft, instead, consistent enforcement of an appropriate penalty would be far better at changing behaviors.
The biggest deterrent was just getting caught in the first place.
If this is a known crime hotspot, shouldn't police just be hanging out there?
American police also stole $2.5 bn in cash and killed 1,100 people in 2020.
I used to hang around some trucking forums and found that in the 70's-80's into the 90's Hunts Point was legendary among truckers as a war zone. From the stories and anecdotes the route between the ports and the expressway was a gauntlet of armed highwaymen. It was so bad truckers would not stop for red lights or stop signs for fear of being hijacked in broad daylight. It was customary to lean on the horn and try to roll through. A few even admitted to illegally carrying a pistol for protection.
I think a ban on guns, and eg., an extreme historical scarcity of them in the UK means we aren't in the same position at all.
Yes there may be gangs. Yes there may be murders. But I think people delivering food on bikes arent in danger basically anywhere.
> Americans often project this "no-go areas" type thinking onto europe. I'm not aware of any "no-go" areas anywhere in the country.
This just comes off as more flame bait. What kind of discussion do you expect to have with this sort of comment?
Also has Boudin done anything significant to combat wage theft? Or do you think since wage theft exists "burn it all down".
I don't understand why you're bringing this up when the TFA is about armed robbery. I do understand why someone would bring up SF in the first place, because SF decided to stop prosecuting "petty larceny". TFA is about what you'd also call "petty larceny", and the city seems to not care about it.
The political system of these major Democrat dominated cities is entirely dysfunctional. The only thing the public sector unions, and their political puppets, offer as a solution, is more social spending:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
The US is just ahead of the pack in unraveling.
(That link only covers through 2019, but if you look at the official CompStat data the two year trend for 2019–2021 is also negative: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statist...)
Some crimes are down, some (e.g. murder) are up.
Crime is down overall, and I suspect that if you controlled for the murder rate increase in all US cities over the past two years it might be flat or down in NYC as well.
For example, as of 2017 feeding pigeons was a misdemeanor in Las Vegas [1]. That will show up in crime data, but you'd be hard-pressed to convince me that it correlates with the murder rate. And if you wanted me to compile a report on crime data, I'd probably ignore it altogether (which is essentially what people are doing when they refer to "violent crime" states).
For a slightly more charged example, let's say property owners push a law against sleeping in public. If they succeed and police don't enforce it, are they "gaming" the metrics? What if most other locals actually oppose the law?
[1] https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-illegal-pigeon-vegas-20...
"Safe" is also very hard to define. Safe for who? Safe in what sense? It's a giant grey area and no one has ever been able to "solve" the crime problem. Getting tough on crime doesn't work, nor does endless social programs, nor does sweeping it under the rug.
Hopefully Adams will take a pragmatic approach and do what he can without making it worse. I wish him well.
I wonder if we’re seeing history repeat itself? Cities grew in the 50’s, then saw people leave in the 60-70’s, then return in the 90’s.
On the other hand, this latest round seems to be the result of poor policy choices.
The cited study is pretty interesting:
"The juxtaposition of these trends and the current high incidence of severe mental illness among those behind bars begs the question of whether the mentally ill have simply been transinstitutionalized from mental hospitals to prisons and jails. A related question concerns the extent to which the unprecedented growth in incarceration since the late 1970s is driven by a reduction in public investment in inpatient mental health services. Past changes in sentencing and corrections policies are currently under heightened scrutiny as state prison populations are at record levels and many states are seeking to scale back correctional populations with an eye on the fiscal benefits of doing so. To the extent that the run-up in state prison populations was driven by deinstitutionalization, the current focus on sentence enhancements and the evolution of the U.S. sentencing regime may be misplaced."
[1] https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/p71.pd...