New York City Is a Lot Safer Than Small-Town America
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
And I say this as someone that likes cities.
Source please
That said, if you ignore NY, Central counties of large metro lead the way in homocide and therefore would likely lead the way in non letal violence. The country and fringe suburbs are much safer on average from homicide by there on measure.
It is only when you add in other causes you see deaths in the country rise.
I think you can cut your chances of being killed in a road accident significantly by controlling your alcohol intake and using common sense. Something like 60% of pedestrian road deaths are intoxicated pedestrians.
Do you have a source for this? I looked up your claim and found this study from the NHTSA[0] (pg 23), which does say that 60% of pedestrians hit have a BAC over 0.08; the catch is, that number is specifically for crashes which occur between 12:00AM and 3:00AM.
From pg 26 - "Of the pedestrians involved [in fatal crashes across all hours], 33 percent were intoxicated, with a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.08 grams per deciliter (g/dl) or greater."
Since the NHSTA study I linked was conducted in 2001, it's possible that new information has been made available in recent years; if that is the case and that's where your data comes from, feel free to link.
[0] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/8094... - pg 23
For some reason your link isn't working, but I was using this report[1]
33% percent of pedestrians were intoxicated, which matches your number.
Another 16% of the pedestrians were on freeways or interstates.
There is no number, but I would guess using a smartphone when crossing streets and not using cross walks are also big risk factors.
I say this not to "blame the victim" but point out that if someone is concerned about being hit by a car, there are a number of simple steps that the pedestrian can take to drastically reduce their risk.
https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2020-02/GHSA-Pedest...
Like... take the subway in NYC [1]? Homicide victims in normal cities that don't have mentally deranged homeless roaming the streets usually did something that enhanced their risk. Homicide victims in NYC... had the unfortunate luck to be selected by mentally ill homeless that should have been institutionalized.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/man-wanted-pushing-woman-on...
So far, in 2022, there have been 4 homicides on the NYC subway. Considering that about 3 million people ride it each weekday (which, in turn, is far below the pre-COVID numbers), I'll take my chances versus our national car deaths statistics.
Yes, so it wouldn't have shown up in your touted homicide stats, yet the fact that it happened makes everyone who rides the subway feel less safe.
How many attempted homicides, attempted muggings, stalkings, etc. are there that never get reported?
> How many attempted homicides, attempted muggings, stalkings, etc. are there that never get reported?
Do you have a source indicating that NYC underreports these crimes uniquely, and not merely that they're generally underreported? Our police are generally zealous when it comes to violent crime statistics, since it allows them to pump the Fear Machine and keep public support up.
I'm sure most of their deaths end up getting found out sooner or later, if they're someone who will be missed. Anything lesser probably ain't gonna be found out if it's gang on gang. This is the kind of stuff that you can kind of 'feel in the air' but can't prove because no gang is going to let Professor Squiggles nerd up on his sociology study during the next hit.
* “Like NYC” is doing a lot of work here. NYC has organized crime, but not a lot of violent organized crime anymore. There’s a reason the handwringing over MS-13 focused on the suburbs of Long Island and not NYC.
* There’s a lot of “it just doesn’t feel right to me” floating around whenever someone points out, statistically, that NYC is both far safer than its recent history and far safer than the rest of the country. And it’s perfectly reasonable that people would feel that way, because it is unintuitive! But unintuitive feelings don’t trump numbers, and there’s no real evidence (including from sources that have a strong incentive to make crime seem as bad as possible) that massive amounts of violent and property crime are going unreported.
Living in the city is one of those places where the statistics sound nice but not going off your intuition eventually catches up to you.
(The stuff about firefights similarly confuses this -- I have no doubt that the NYPD is afraid of getting into gunfights. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the routine paperwork of recording a homicide victim.)
Intuition is meant to comport with ground reality, and the ground reality is that NYC is not gangland anymore (and hasn't been for decades). Other cities might still be, but we aren't.
Ultimately recorded crime data should be used as an aid to guide our decisions, in combination with other signals. I would consider your view reckless in light of deciding how to go about my life in the city, but ultimately it is your decision to make and I hope it guides you well.
Even with the 2022 rise, the subway remains substantially safer than any other form of transit.
By miles traveled or by the total number of deaths occurred while traveling?
* Number of deaths, miles traveled
* Number of deaths, per capita commuter
* Number of deaths from violent crime or negligence, miles traveled
* Number of deaths from violent crime or negligence, per capita commuter
I would love to see how the numbers compare
This sounds like an extraordinary claim, what data are you using to get there?
Completely unpredictable and impossible-to-prevent car crashes do happen sometimes, but they are a very tiny minority. Most car crashes have a clear chain of events that led to them that could've been prevented.
Anecdotally, I see much more petty disregard for traffic laws by cars (including large vans and trucks) than I did before COVID.
[1]: https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/last-year-was-deadlies...
That’s effectively zero.
[1]: https://www.timessquarenyc.org/do-business/market-research-d...
If you are involved in gang or other criminal behavior, you are a heightened risk of death, but it is still a pretty random occurrence. If not, you have a much lower risk, and it is still pretty random should it actually occur.
I think it is pretty fair to lump them in together.
Not complete control, but pretty good.
But we already knew that people worry about getting held up at gunpoint in the big city, but not so much about crashing their car on the way to the big night out (or even worse, on the way home).
I live in a small village and there is currently discussion going on about extending the legal amount of time a person can keep holiday decorations on their house. On one side are the folks that think Christmas lights are way too tacky in February or March and on the other side are the folks that say the weather could easily make it too dangerous to get them down within time limits (never mind how dumb and overbearing it is to have time limits in the first place). I lived in Chicago for 20 years and some people had holiday lights on their million dollar condo balconies year round - because it is never safe to take them down lol (kidding).
The need for some people to police *everything* is exhausting.
I feel similarly about Putin invading Ukraine. How do you get up in the morning so motivated and full of energy to order kids to go massacre other kids? I can barely muster the juice to write a few lines of code and hit the gym.
I've lived in/near NYC, Baltimore, Boston, and Philly. Baltimore's the only one where I've been mugged (at gunpoint no less), or really robbed at all. Also someone was murdered in the building across the street from my apartment, in a botched home invasion. And I lived in one of the "better" neighborhoods.
Baltimore has an amazing creative scene (music/art/film/etc) and great food, and I actually really enjoyed living there, but the safety issue is quite serious.
I don't think the problem is insurmountable though. I'm surprised whenever I visit Washington DC in recent years, because DC used to be even more dangerous than Baltimore, but you'd never know it today.
NYC is on the complete opposite side of the spectrum. 15 years here and I've never had a serious incident, and I'm struggling to even think of anything major affecting any of my friends too.
Over the last decade that I've been here, someone has died in an extremely suspicious way and there are never any reported homicides. Yet if you calculate those deaths out per 100k/year the rate is much higher than the urban area I spend time in. Yet everyone in the rural area is afraid of the dangerous city. In the end, my guess is that a lot of rural areas don't have the same quality of reporting or police presents that a city can afford.
I'm open to the idea NYC safer than its reputation; I appreciate NYC a lot, and live in another city, San Francisco, with a 'meaner' rep than I think true/fair.
But, there's a bunch of things that make me suspicious of the main graph/rankings:
(1) Leaving out suicide & drug ODs. These vary a lot by region, so whether a region creates motive & opportunity to throw your life away is a relevant 'safeness' indicator, for most people.
(2) Leaving out "accidental poisonings" & "falls". These may hide violence & other dangerous living conditions, especially in dense cities, or marginal communities, where many simply don't bother to report to authorities every assault - but do still have to seek medical care for an ‘accident’. People in "small town America" die of these things too, so why shouldn't a 'safeness' metric include them?
(3) The author uses a vague catchall exclusion category "sequelae of external causes of morbidity and mortality" that risks hiding relevant dangers, including even aftereffects of earlier violent-injuries, depending on coding standards of exact/immediate cause-of-death.
(4) For the widely-forwarded horizontal bar-graph titled "America’s Safest Metro Areas, but not all the analyses, the author uses the whole "New York-Newark, NY-NJ-PA" metro. The nearest part of PA to NYC seems to be Delaware Water Gap, 80 miles/1h40m away! So this winds up including a lot of 'small towns' & suburbs, not really "NYC" itself.
Altogether, when there's this many footnotes about a custom & perhaps idiosyncratic-to-the-author definition of "external causes", there's reason for pause before shouting a pleasingly-contrarian result from the rooftops.
I asked the Bloomberg author for details of the ICD-10 codes used in his custom definitions – https://twitter.com/gojomo/status/1534624384102461440 – but he did not respond.
Drugs, cars, suicide, falls, and murder kill rural folks more than New Yorkers. Drugs and cars seem to be the outsized killers, based on the data provided.
I would like to see the data about where people died, not where they lived, as part of these measurements. It might not tell you where to live, but it would tell you where not to go.
Shouldn't we also consider the density of people and exposure to crime? What good is it to live in a place where you're surrounded by crime in close proximity? Kowloon walled city [1] probably had less per capita crime as an extreme example of population density.
NYC has a FUCKTON OF PEOPLE. And crime isn't uniformaly spread among it all. Some small sub-sections could be accounting for dispraportionately more than others. So with both of those things, the liklihood of a crime happening is very high. But not per 100k people.
That's the big difference. If there is 1 shooting per 100k people, and there are 5 million people around, that's 50 shootings. Vs if you have only 10,000 people around. At 10,000 people, you might see a shooting every 5 years, but proportionately that's double the NYC rate.
That's where the visibility vs reality is so counter-intuitive.
Also interestingly enough, I see A LOT of homeless (I work near a shelter). And they are indeed crazy looking. But honestly the worst they do is yell at you, and often its because they haven't had real human contact in months. Just imagine being isolated inside a massive crowd.
Go walk around 86th btwn Lex and 3rd at night and let me know what your study says then.
NYC is dangerous, filthy, and extremely expensive. Every day I’m thankful I’m out of there.
The point is NYC still has big city problems (one could argue the biggest, because it is the biggest), especially around homelessness and how to correctly provide care for them. That does not mean NYC is not safe.
I have never felt safer living in both Manhattan and Queens, as opposed to the Bay Area or living in Chicago.
Also this fascination with NYC and it's trash situation is such a tired and frankly disingenuous dig at the city. While it is expensive, no argue there, it is not dangerous or filthy. You'd think after having lived there for 15 years you'd have some pride in becoming a New Yorker (lord knows I do and weep for the fact I no longer live there) but maybe the city is better off without you.
So you just assert it's fine and continue with an ad hominem argument?
Allow me to retort: maybe it's a trash pit of a city because of apologists like you? NYC reeks in a way I've not encountered outside of the US.
If only trash was the only issue.
Walk around Chinatown on hot days and you can smell the fish juice the stores dump into the streets/sidewalks baking in the sun. Then yes, you have the huge piles of garbage bags on the streets everywhere.
But really what I was referring to was the infestation in many buildings of some combination of mice, rats, cockroaches, and bedbugs. This includes Manhattan and the outer boroughs and includes buildings where you're paying $3k/month to rent a tiny apartment.
The rat problem in UES is particularly bad. They're everywhere.
Of course there's the homeless pee all over midtown that you get to randomly get a nice whiff of as you're walking around. Or the upscale neighborhoods where everyone owns a little dog (so there are hundreds of them on the same small set of sidewalks) covered in pee every morning.
I'm actually amazed that anyone who's lived in the city would deny that it's filthy, it's so obvious to me that I didn't expect that to be controversial.
Either you're in that relative minority or you are completely blowing the problem out of proportion.
I’ve had many friends, and personally experienced, the problem with mice and cockroaches in buildings.
The rats tend to be outside but they’re not confined to the subway. They’re in the bushes in all the parks, in the trash areas in front of almost all buildings at least in UES, under outdoor dining decks, everywhere. I kicked one by accident while walking down the street one night.
It may also be a time period thing. When COVID began the rat problem was already bad but for some reason got much worse since.
My parents have left their car doors unlocked, their house wide open, keys on the dash, money in plain sight, for 40+ years. Not once, not even even once, has a theft occurred.
Violent crime however is a certain reality in NYC.
That said, the numbers don't really lie: New York (the state, including the city) ranks lowest in burglaries per capita[1]. For larceny theft, the state is also towards the bottom[2]. Those are state numbers, of course, but almost half of the state lives in the city.
[1]: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-most-burglaries-in-t...
[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/232583/larceny-theft-rat...
* NYC recorded 6,486 burglaries in 2021, for a population of 8.38 million. That's 77.39 burglaries per 100,000 people, which makes the city's burglary rate lower than the rest of the state.
* The city recorded 18,862 grand larcenies in 2021, for the same population. That's 225.08 larcenies per 100,000 people, which is also lower than the rest of the state.
Both burglaries and larceny are up this year, significantly. But even if they double, NYC will still be well below national and state averages.
Edit: Correcting myself: the final statistics[2] for robbery in 2021 show 12811 robberies, for a final rate of 152.88. That's still a fraction of NY state's burglary rate, which is the lowest in the nation. For grand larceny it's 487.71, which is also still below both state and national averages (by two thirds).
[1]: https://compstat.nypdonline.org
[2]: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_...
As a poster above you mentioned, why report a crime if you know nothing will be done.
I suspect a survey of residents, asking questions like, "have you had anything stolen that you did not file a police report about?", would reveal relative urban versus suburban or rural propensity-to-report trends here better than official crime stats – but I don't know of such a data series.
I've never had to file a police report for theft in NYC (where I've lived for 20+ years), because I've never had anything stolen from me. Unless you count the kid who, in third grade, stole my Pokemon cartridge. But the response to that involved schoolyard justice.
But "independent adult" also doesn't mean much. I was riding the subway alone by the time I was 7 or 8, and didn't have anything resembling a curfew.
If you were talking about petty theft, I'd agree with you, but for the most part, burglaries are nearly always reported.
In small towns and cities all around the world, people don't report crimes for a variety of reasons. It's not clear why that would be more true in NYC than elsewhere.
When I first moved to NYC, it was a wet, slushy winter. My wife left her shoes outside our apartment door to dry off overnight, in a locked building with about 12 other units.
By 7am the next morning, they’d vanished. I had to go buy her replacement shoes.
We didn’t report the theft; why bother? The police couldn’t and wouldn’t do anything about it.
The next four years in NYC weren’t all that different; lots of petty theft and crime, all the time, everywhere. Unreported and unresolved.
These days, I live in the mountains outside of Boulder. Absolutely zero crime over the past 10 years. Our yearly murder rate up in the hills is zero, and has been zero for decades.
I've lived here my entire life, and I've never had my shoes stolen from outside my apartment, whether the building was locked or unlocked. I'm sorry that that happened to your wife, but it's a single instance.
Unless you're saying that people in New York disproportionately don't report crime that doesn't change much about the rankings. And also having lived very rural and very urban my intuition is that there is significantly more unreported law-breaking in the countryside (sometimes for the mundane reason that there barely is police in the first place).
People in New York don’t report crime that disproportionately occurs in places like New York.
Edit: And in no time someone chimes in about their safe life they currently live in Tokyo, Japan -- probably the safest large city in in the entire world and one if if not the safest country in the world. Hope y'all have your visas ready. Of course we know this is in bad faith, because the Japanese analogy would be to compare Tokyo to rural Japan not to small town America.
My brother lives in a small town, and kids in his neighborhood shot their kids with BB guns. They have issues with neighbors leaving their dogs off leash and attacking their dogs. They've had people from the neighborhood try to run them off the road. None of these things get reported to the police, because the police won't do anything, and you'll start a crazy feud with the neighbors. You don't hear about family feuds in the city, but they're a constant in small towns and can last generations.
I've lived in New Orleans, NYC, SF, and Tokyo, and other than New Orleans, I'd say every place has felt safer than when I lived in small towns or the country when I was growing up.
Most cities, especially nowadays, are quite safe. I think small towns are generally also safe, but from my personal experience, I've found the country to be less safe than cities because you're effectively on your own.
I think perhaps the city is safer for people who solve things by reporting problems to authority, whereas country is safer for those who rely on themselves. If you live in rural areas and depend on police for anything other than helping get the word out and possibly picking up someone after the fact, you are just fucked.
I guarantee you it won't.
I rode my bike to high school (in a "bad" neighborhood) regularly, and locked it outside with a regular cable lock. It was never stolen. When I got a job, I locked my bike up with the same cable lock for months, until I got access to the bike room. Never stolen.
Bike theft does happen here; I know people who have had bikes stolen. But it's not particularly common, even given the rise in expensive e-bikes.
> Do you seriously believe that there's some kind of omnipotent bike theft ring in NYC, poaching bikes as soon as they're locked up?
Literally yes. Do you even actually live in NYC?
I’m not blind to some advantages I have: I’m tall, have a large frame, and a deep voice. But I was also a little kid for the first 18 years I was here, and nothing bad ever happened to me.
Yes, I really do live here. And yes, there are bike theft rings. But they’re not omnipotent, and they’re fundamentally opportunistic; I’ve never had any issues with any bike I’ve owned being stolen, and neither has anybody else in my family.
> I went to public schools here
There's a world of difference between a public school in a wealthy area and one in a shitty one. The former might as well be a private school in terms of the quality of instruction and available funding from PTA donations.
I'll do the same in my small midwestern town.
We can repeat this experiment until you run out of money.
That's why we use per capita statics.
My cell phone: will be returned by my neighbor.
I'll take the "bias" in the numbers all day lol
How do you know it is disproportionately? I live in a suburb (not in NY) and I've never reported petty theft. What would be the point? Police isn't going to do anything about it.
Really?
> When I first moved to NYC, it was a wet, slushy winter. My wife left her shoes outside our apartment door to dry off overnight, in a locked building with about 12 other units.
I kinda feel sorry for your wife shoes, but personally I wouldn't even list that in theft: unless you live in Japan, yes, things left outside your house DO tend to vanish, especially if left overnight!
> The next four years in NYC weren’t all that different; lots of petty theft and crime, all the time, everywhere. Unreported and unresolved.
Can you please share more? Because our definitions of theft seem so different that I seriously wonder what you call crime.
Personally, I've always felt safe in NYC and NJ. Oh god I miss the good food from Palisades Park...
> These days, I live in the mountains outside of Boulder
I have visited Boulder and noticed quite a few things besides the obvious like how it's not welcoming to smokers (smoking is banned everywhere). Among the disturbing ones, the police force seems to enjoy harassing the homeless. I was told about that and didn't believe it until I witnessed it with my own eyes. That's far more concerning to me to have shoes stolen outside my home.
Also, people felt kinda fake? As in, lots of virtue signaling, but I felt uneasy in a very creepy way.
It's very hard to describe. It suffices to say there's no amount of money you could pay me to live in Boulder, while NYC stills feels like home even if I don't live there anymore.
Maybe my few days of visit was just a fluke, but it's rare I've felt so bad about a city to say something as harsh.
That's quite a sad thing you've grown used to. I've lived in suburbs in several states and not one would have me saying that things left outside my house tend to vanish.
You should expect more from your fellow citizens. Not stealing is a basic decency and sending thieves to jail should be a basic tenet of society.
This is exactly analogous to blaming someone for walking home at 3am through a badly lit area while visibly having money, or being attractive and dressed to show it.
This warrants introspection on your part: if you're afraid but the people actually here aren't (including every woman I know), is it possible that your idea of the situation doesn't reflect its reality?
Then please define "violent crime", because from what I've seen below (some shoes stolen outside a home) isn't what I'd even list as theft.
Doors and locks might not be sufficient for security but full time employees guarding the building would.
This is not because sensationalist media has successfully tricked them into thinking there is more crime than there is, but because they have directly experienced the rise in crime in their daily lives.
. . . it's because they never leave the metro area or even consider conditions anywhere else.
That was my experience living there, anyway. A glaring blindness to anything not NY, where everything happens.
People will say all sorts of kooky things based on vibes.
No conflict of interest here.