Hacker News Reader

Comment by orange_joe | Hacker News Reader

NYC is generally safer than the rest of America. NH is typically the safest region in the entire country. But the truth is that there are high numbers of relatively rural areas that are substantially more dangerous than NYC. Also, I think that crimes/mile is fairly un-instructive because of how much the legal boundaries of a city shift/as well as the amount that a person will travel in a given location (I live in NYC, and probably live/work/eat within a 1.5-2 mile range).

p.s. I really like your content!

View on HN

> NYC is generally safer than the rest of America.

I don't think that's true: NYC is at 5.8 violent crimes per 1,000, and the national median sits at 4.0. That's 45% more violent than the median. That's not small! I feel like some PR firm must have implanted this idea in everyone's minds that NYC is somehow magically safer, but it's not showing up in the stats, and if the stats are skewed by reporting its almost certainly worse, not better.

I have a sneaking suspicion that New Yorkers who think NYC is safe are comparing it to 1980s NY, rather than contemporary $other_region.

Or maybe they're only comparing themselves to Chicago and Rio de Janeiro?

I’ve heard this stat before, but comparing to large cities.

NY is generally safer than Chicago, LA, Seattle, Boston, and Fort Worth; Wikipedia places it in 59th place for most violent crime per capita amongst the nation’s largest 100 cities.

The problem with any of these comparisons is that cities are very heterogeneous. In Boston, the Back Bay != Roxbury and in NYC, the West Village != the South Bronx. However, at least absent a doorman, I probably wouldn't leave a door unlocked or an accessible window ajar the way I routinely do in my (only) semi-rural home in New England. When I visit people in cities, I have to consciously remember that they'll be unhappy if I am casual about such things like I am at home.

I mean…or it’s that some of us have lived in New York for decades and not experienced even a little bit of violent crime. Born and raised New Yorker here.

I grew up in Indianapolis, where the violent crime rate is 8.7 per 1000. Growing up, we had plenty of trips to Columbus, OH (16.6), Detroit, MI (21.8), Cincinnati, OH (8.9), and, yes, Chicago, IL (9.9).

Granted, sometimes we'd visit smaller, safer college towns, like Purdue's Lafayette Indiana University's Bloomington, or Ball State's Muncie, IN. Only Muncie had a lower crime rate than NYC. Then again, Notre Dame's South Bend (17.3) University of Evansville (10.1), and Rose-Hulman's Terre Haute (14.6) kind of dispelled the idea of college town safefy.

My current town is at 36 violent crime per 1000 residents, but the statistics are collected differently, so it may not be an exact comparison.

NYC isn't safer than the majority of the country. But, compared to where I've been, it's felt pretty safe every time I stopped by.

I don’t know. I never felt generally unsafe in New York if I was out late at night (after midnight or 1am) and walking alone to the subway or whatever. Part of it I think is that the city “never sleeps” so you don’t get the feeling of being alone. There’s always other people around.

(My mom felt differently and would often force me to take a car home if I was leaving the office at 10pm in NYC — but my mom would feel that way about any city I lived in.)

In SF, I’ve felt *very* unsafe being out before midnight (I was once propositioned for prostitution 4 times in a 2 block walk). Same in Seattle, where my own neighborhood has felt downright unsafe after 7pm on certain nights. Same in parts of Atlanta. Same in parts of LA.

I can’t compare it to places like New Hampshire or the suburbs — but I’m a female who weighs between 105 and 110lbs and yes, I’m white so that might help me, and I haven’t been to every part of NYC late at night — I’m sure there are places I wouldn’t want to be alone — but I do think that it is generally safe.

I was shocked by how much more crime was in Seattle than where I lived in Brooklyn.

There is another part of New York which is just that people generally leave you alone. So you’re surrounded by people who you can call out for help to, but you’re also not usually badgered by randos on the street.

I can’t talk about statistics but I can talk about how safe I feel. And I feel safer in NYC than any other major US city I’ve lived in or visited.

I think this is where statistics fails me. You (and a couple sibling comments) are responding to my comment with your experiences to the contrary, and I—never having lived in NYC—just don't have access to that.

This passage[1] probably sums up the difference between aggregate crime stats and NYC residents' own assessments:

> Looking at NYPD crime reports for 2010, 2015, and 2020, we find that about 1% of streets in NYC produce about 25% of crime, and about 5% of streets produce about 50% of crime. This is consistent across the three years, showing that a very small proportion of streets in the city are responsible for a significant proportion of the crime problem.

I wonder if this phenomenon is different in different cities. Are the "shapes" of crime all "spiky" in New York, but more spread out in Seattle?

[1] https://www.manhattan-institute.org/weisburd-zastrow-crime-h...

The "spikiness" of crime in NYC is extreme. I lived about two blocks away from a housing project which had a low but steady rate of assault, rape, and even the occasional murder. You wouldn't know it on my street and I never felt unsafe. I think the density of the city and relative lack of car mobility makes crime extremely non-uniformly distributed compared to most other cities (where everyone drives).

I think that overall crime rates can have severely skewed reporting. Homicide rate in NYC is 5.5 vs US average of 7.5, But manhattan's is even lower. The last time the city reported the borough by borough breakdown (2019), had a homicide rate of 3.2.

I don’t think the relative percent is a good way to compare 5.8 per 1000 vs 4.0 per 1000. It can easily be flipped to show that NYC is only 0.18% less safe than the national median.

Now look at dangers in general and not just crime and the picture is very different[1]. Judging by the total number of deaths from external causes, NYC was the second safest metro area in the country behind only Boston.

Much of that is because NYC has drastically fewer transportation deaths than most of the US. The worst states have literally twenty times as many traffic deaths as NYC.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-07/is-new...

I've only ever heard the claim made in reference to other large cities, not suburban, rural, or exurban parts of the country.

Its trivially true that dense urban environments are going to have different baseline patterns of crime

It also seems pretty clear to me that this is the context OP was speaking in, given that almost everything else he described are features of big cities.

>"NYC is generally safer than the rest of America."

What does that even mean - "generally" safer? Saying "generally" and "the rest of America" are nebulous to the point of being completely meaningless. If I were to compare hunting accidents, wild fires and car accidents in NYC compared to the "rest of the America" then yeah sure. Have a look at these NYPD crime stats from May and tell me that it's safer than the entire "rest of America."

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/p00050/nypd-citywide-cri...

I don't agree with being generally safer but NYC is pretty safe. The United States is pretty safe. A lot of the world is pretty safe.

In terms of homicides though the US is less safe than Pakistan, India, Iran and Egpyt and other big countries.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com