Would you say St Louis is a safer city because it looks very clean and classy, well loved by tourists, and also has sparser homicides? Similarly, would you say that Palestine OH is a safer city on biological risks by arguments of geographic sparsity?
if the crime stats showed the same rate per sq mile for two cities, one with a population of 1M and the other 100k, would you want to go to the 100K city or the 1M city?
The stat they cited was the total number of murders so really what I'm comparing is murders per square mile.