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Comment by AlotOfReading | Hacker News Reader

I can't find similar numbers to yours for any definition of 'violent crime' I found numbers for, but assuming they're true, it's still missing the point. Amherst is a wealthy community in a wealthy, low crime state. It'd be like pointing to a border town to make the opposite argument.

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As I mentioned down-thread, NYC has 45% more violent crime than the national median. It's simply not a "low crime" place, despite the PR.

NYC has a lower homicide rate than America, and that is the only category of crime that is mostly consistently reported across jurisdictions. Every other category of crime basically varies by an order of magnitude from place to place depending on accuracy of reporting.

This is important point. Apples and oranges.

What about Manhattan? What about lower Manhattan? The reality is that NYC is large and there's bodies of water separating huge parts of the city. Talking about crime in NYC seems really silly because you're going to be talking about tons of neighborhoods that you're just never, ever going to end up even close to.

We are already talking about Manhattan (New York, NY), it is where these numbers are from, and what the OP article is about.

Obviously in The Bronx the numbers are much worse (9.28), and in Brooklyn they're a tiny bit better (5.43) but still well over USA median. Queens (3.25) is safer than median, though.

New York county(or borough) is Manhattan(for the most part), but that is talking about the city of New York, which includes Manhattan, Queens, Kings(~Brooklyn), Bronx, and Richmond(~Staten Island).

I wonder how many people think New York City is only Manhattan and not the 5 Boroughs together. For anyone who see this, yes it includes the “suburbs” that exists within all of the outer boroughs (even the Bronx!)

Funny...one of my favorite pastimes as a new yorker was collecting New York esoterica...a fun related one(relevant to my "for the most part" parenthetical in my original post) is the fact that Manhattan is an island and a borough, but part of the island is actually connected to the mainland in the Bronx.

Marble hill was once fully a part of the northernmost point of Manhattan island, but a canal was cut south of it which turned Marble hill into an actual island all by itself. Later, the waterway to the north of Marble hill was diverted into the canal, so Marble Hill became connected by land to the Bronx and separated by water from the island of Manhattan, but it is still considered a part of Manhattan borough...

And as has been explained to you multiple times, you're using inconsistently defined and reported data across jurisdictions with different practices.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Yes, but using the same data, NYC is only 0.18% less safe than the national median. We are venturing deeply into "there are lies, damn lies, and statistics" territory.

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