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Comment by isaacremuant | Hacker News Reader

I never understand why people feel like they can make such generalizing statements as "One of the European capitals".

Europe is not a monolith.

Different areas also have different problems.

It's like the whole talk about "walkable cities" or healthcare.

Everything is frame from a US perspective and simplified to an absurd level so that no contextual criticism is possible without descending into weird political tribalism and an apples to oranges comparison between an entire continent and a country.

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OK then make it apples to apples and compare crime rates in your preferred manner? It’s hard to make the US look good no matter what grouping or aggregation or whatever you choose. There’s a clear difference in policies and their downstream effects (eg poverty rate) between the US and a random European city you select by throwing a dart at a map. Not all, but do a few trials and pretend not to see a pattern.

e: Also, sorry, it's ridiculous to say the US looks to Europe too much when discussing policy. This almost never happens, and when it does it's from the left, who has 0 actual influence. Every policy discussion should begin by talking about prior art & what we've observed about the effectiveness of policies as implemented elsewhere. It'll never show causality, but it'll start the discussion off with some possible causal links to explore w/ our own policy experiments!

Because it doesn't matter which European capital. No country in western Europe has a higher homicide rate than the US.

>which European capital.

Kiev, 2020-2022.

Obvious there are some exceptions, but that's why I said "western europe."

Pre-war Kyiv was still much much better than say St. Louis.

USA! USA!

We found an example of a place more violent than most cities in the richest country on earth and possibly in all of human history!

It's a city in a country engaged in a hot war!

I know your comment is tongue-in-cheek but the overall US homicide rate is comparable to the UN casualty count for the Russo-Ukraine war (most of which will be in Donbas, not Kyiv). So I wouldn't be completely certain the rate in Kyiv is necessarily higher. I don't think there's good figures but I'd wager it's actually lower than some US cities.

Yes, a city torn in war is less safe than SF, I'll give you that!

Might as well add Lagos too!

Chicago has murder rates that eclipse actual wars.

And I hear they have new progressive mayor, close call there almost flew too close to the center https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/04/chicago-mayo...

it aint called chiraq for no reason you know

Per Wikipedia, in 2019 there were 1428 murders across Ukraine (perhaps this includes the already-invaded Donbas and Luhansk regions, though I somewhat doubt it).

Let's assume all of those happened in Kiev, with a population of 2.8 million (since I can't find more specific data easily right now). That gives a wildly inflated homicide rate per 100,000 population of 51.

St Louis, Baltimore, Birmingham (AL) all had murder rates that year higher than this inflated figure.

I don't think it's in dispute that most European capitals of any size have areas where one could easily get murdered, though. I can personally easily think of areas of London and Paris where I'd not be surprised by news of it happening.

kiev is hardly what comes to mind when talking about european capitals.

I dunno, London is getting up there. I'm sure London, England has more murders per captia than quite a few major US cities.

At about 1.4 it's still pretty low compared to American cities. It's also not really "getting up there" as it appears to be on a relative decline lately.

That decline comes round about when they started to cut police funding. Curious. Kinda like they stopped finding the bodies.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/864491/london-police-bud...

Not really sure what you're talking about.

The stats you link to a meaningless. The city of London don't set the budget for their police. That is a matter handled by the British goverment and according to them they've been decreasing it for 8-years straight.

> When compared with the previous year, overall funding for policing (including any in-year adjustments) for the financial year ending March 2023 will increase by 2.8% in real terms. This will be the eighth consecutive year in which policing funding has increased in real terms

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/police-funding-for-...

UK is not Europe. London is not a European city.

Has the UK left the continent? What?

"Continental" has been a pejorative in English for centuries. They're not Europeans. They're Brits.

We should compare San Francisco to other American cities, like Tijuana.

UK is part of the European continent in terms of culture and geology. Perhaps you mean the EU, which is only part of Europe, instead of the continent itself.

There's probably some examples, but the US has such an outsized per-capita murder rate that it's not particularly comparable even when trying to select the best examples. If you stretch the definition of "major" and "comparable" then it's possible to find examples where they're somewhat similar but it requires a lot of stretching and is no longer representative. There's hundreds of cities in America with a murder rate higher than that of London. The US has a homicide rate approaching something like an order of magnitude higher than the UK (8/100k vs. 1/100k last I read).

London is quite low but unfortunately death by stabbing in the teens-to-20s age group has increased dramatically over the last two decades.

If you're not in that demographic, you're probably fine.

Yep. Us Europeans have a tendency to pretend that "America Bad - Europe Good". And sure, we don't have the gun violence and have healthcare, but we also have our own share of violent crime.

And of course it all depends on many factors, but I know for a fact that not all of Paris is safe, or all of Berlin. You have your bad apples everywhere.

>Europe is not a monolith.

Doesn't have to be. Almost all (if not all) European cities have much lower homicide rates. To the tune of multiple times lower.

Sure, all generalisations are wrong and it even depends by the neighbourhood but the highest homicide rate in Europe appears to be in Tallinn and it's on par with Seattle. The only very worst places in Europe overlap with the very best in US. San Francisco also appear to be on the better part, way worse than Tallinn still.

Even Istanbul, which is a 15M population city in a country with serious economic turmoil and and has huge number of refugees and illegal immigrants from war torn countries, is much batter than most of the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_rat...

> never understand why people feel like they can make such generalizing statements

Simply to remain more anonymous.

Just based on statistics it is very easy to make such generalizations.

During the civil war in Lebanon in eighties it was safer there than in modern US.

> Europe is not a monolith.

When it's about homicide rates, it kinda is though.

> Different areas also have different problems.

It's rarely violence at the level you see in an American city.

> It's like the whole talk about "walkable cities" or healthcare.

Yeah, I feel it for you, but it's mostly true. With rare exceptions.

While in the US it's mostly false, with rare exceptions.

I feel you, people also make a lot of generalizing statements about the USA, especially Europeans.

Europe is part of the Asian continent. I think the idea that it’s a continent is eurocentrism. Perhaps you could say it’s a subcontinent of Asia, like India.

No it's not, it's either two continents Europe and Asia or one continent Eurasia (or even more rarely Afro-Eurasia), but certainly not part of Asia, it's like saying North America is part of South America, it can be either North America or both are part of America, but North America is certainly not part of South America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent

North America and South America are clearly different landmasses, whereas Europe is a section of a large land mass we call Asia with the exception of the section we call Europe. It’s just part of 1 end of Asia. If Europe is a separate continent, why isn’t the India? The Middle East?

Because it works in general? Even the worst country in Europe [1] (Latvia 4.9 murders/100k pop.) by murder rate is better than US average (6.6/100K) [2] with France 1.1, Germany 0.9, etc. So unless you choose extreme in Europe you are looking for sure at least at 3-5 times lower murder rates in Europe.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1268504/homicide-rate-eu...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

As we can see by comparing the county map of the USA that you linked with a demographic map, murder in the USA is overwhelmingly a demographic issue. We can debate the reasons why, but the data itself is readily available and incontrovertible. The changing demographics of Western Europe will prove an interesting new data point for that debate.

I don’t think a picture of a map is incontrovertible? https://xkcd.com/1138/

What are the arguments against your position that you think are strongest and why are they so weak that you think they can be considered ‘incontrovertible’?

Fair objection. I thought it was obvious that the map was just a visualization and not the incontrovertible data. That would be the data from various high quality reports such as those produced by the UCR[1], BJS[2], NACJD[3], and the MAP[4].

I don't know of any non-straw arguments against my position that demographics are a dominating factor in homicide rates because of the high quality of the homicide data. Note that I say factor and not cause. The causes for these observable patterns are very much under debate. Nevertheless, corpses are hard to ignore. The paperwork almost always gets filed, so the data quality is considerably higher than for underreported crimes such as rape.

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/

[2] https://bjs.ojp.gov/

[3] https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/pages/NACJD/

[4] https://www.murderdata.org/p/offenders.html

...are you saying people in cities commit murder?

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