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Comment by danenania | Hacker News Reader

I haven't seen data on this, but my intuition is the opposite: that all violent crime would tend to be correlated with the murder rate. That's partly because any violent crime can easily escalate to a murder. Maybe I'm wrong though. I'm not finding a clear answer with some cursory googling, but I'd imagine this has been studied.

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Outside of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder rate was highly correlated with the violent crime rate. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became less correlated as more people died due to a lack of available emergency healthcare while hospital systems were overloaded.

What?

Source please

This would be true if crimes were all reported, but most low-level violence isn't.

There’s also enough variance in how things get classified by police departments that a lot of studies just end up counting murder and manslaughter since those are pretty standard and hard to fudge.

I think there is probably some correlation there.

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.

Exactly. And I think the really interesting question here is: why is the murder rate in New York City so much lower than in other large metro areas?

It's a really good question. If I were to guess I would think that one factor would be cost of living pushing high-risk individuals out of the city. Violent crime is closely tied to economic status. Maybe there's some big policy wins in there too but that is where I would start.

High population density seems like another likely factor. In a lot of NYC, and especially in Manhattan, there are people out on the streets at all hours. I assume that discourages crime.

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