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EDIT:
There is no mention of UCR as data source, where did you get it from?
https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/about-the-data/crime-rates
From the FBI itself:
> Pitfalls of Ranking
> UCR data are sometimes used to compile rankings of individual jurisdictions and institutions of higher learning. These incomplete analyses have often created misleading perceptions which adversely affect geographic entities and their residents. For this reason, the FBI has a long-‐ standing policy against ranking participating law enforcement agencies on the basis of crime data alone. Despite repeated warnings against these practices, some data users continue to challenge and misunderstand this position.
How do you even define a city in this case? You say those are normalized crime stats per 1k residents - how big are the metro areas? Are there any cities that also count a portion of their suburbs as part of the city? Does doing so reduce per-capita crime stats? etc...
My suggestion would be to thoroughly vet your sources before posting their conclusions as fact.
If you know where their source data comes from and why its so accurate, feel free to educate me. Their own site says this:
> Q. Why rank cities on safety even though the FBI cautions against it?
> A. This report and/or our data cannot and should not be used as a measure of the effectiveness of law enforcement due to the myriad factors that can contribute to crime in a community.
This is suprising to me as non-American because Detroit reads to me "like gang-infested murdercity" and I would have expected San Francisco to do significantly better in crime numbers...
Are the numbers misleading or IS criminality in San Francisco comparable to Detroit?
Data users should not rank locales because there are many factors that cause the nature and type of crime to vary from place to place. UCR statistics include only jurisdictional population figures along with reported crime, clearance, or arrest data. Rankings ignore the uniqueness of each locale. Some factors that are known to affect the volume and type of crime occurring from place to place are:
• Population density and degree of urbanization.
• Variations in composition of the population, particularly youth concentration.
• Stability of the population with respect to residents; mobility, commuting patterns, and transient factors.
• Economic conditions, including median income, poverty level, and job availability.
• Modes of transportation and highway systems.
• Cultural factors and educational, recreational, and religious characteristics.
• Family conditions with respect to divorce and family cohesiveness.
• Climate.
• Effective strength of law enforcement agencies.
• Administrative and investigative emphases on law enforcement.
• Policies of other components of the criminal justice system (i.e., prosecutorial, judicial, correctional, and probational).
• Citizens’ attitudes toward crime.
• Crime reporting practices of the citizenry.
Because their methodology is well described:
https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/about-the-data/crime-rates
The FBI puts out one main source of crime stats - UCR. On the UCR site that I linked to: "The UCR Program includes data from more than 18,000 city, university and college, county, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies." Those numbers aren't a coincidence.
UCR is the main data product that people use for (usually incorrect) analysis. The FBI itself says that the data is incomplete to the point that it should not be used as a way to determine the safety of a location.
And further: Once we have these complete set of reported crime data, along with millions of geocoded reported crime incidents using a GIS, we begin our crime data development process.
The results are fine resolution, highly accurate crime data that are comparable nationally.
Our approach provides you the ability to look at small areas effectively.
In some cases a city agency is in charge of law enforcement, while in other areas it’s a county. In many cases it is more than one agency for a geographic area. Since the geography varies, it’s difficult to compare the scores among jurisdictions, or to get a true and complete picture of crime risk. This is why we use a relational database to assess the true count of reported crimes in a locality.
Although most agencies report, not all do. This creates holes in the data. Our method allows us to accurately fill in the holes based on the crime experience of many like locales, and provide accurate crime data for anywhere in the U.S.
> And further: Once we have these complete set of reported crime data, along with millions of geocoded reported crime incidents using a GIS, we begin our crime data development process.
> The results are fine resolution, highly accurate crime data that are comparable nationally.
> Our approach provides you the ability to look at small areas effectively."
Can you explain to me what their methodology is? Because this is just marketing-speak and doesn't provide any facts about how or why their analysis is accurate.
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Edit: from their own site!
> Q. Why rank cities on safety even though the FBI cautions against it?
> A. This report and/or our data cannot and should not be used as a measure of the effectiveness of law enforcement due to the myriad factors that can contribute to crime in a community.
- https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/faq/top100dangerous#q9
This is literally taken from the FBI doc that I linked to earlier.
Just how it is on the internet, most people who post the "numbers" are doing so for a very specific intention, and it's not at all to highlight the objectivity of them. You'll want to get the source research yourself and see what they say about it, and usually most papers tend to be far more nuanced than "thing bad" or "thing good".
It seems though that some Bay located HN readers disagree with both statistical and anecdotal evidence, which might be actually an example of sunken cost bias (it's not surprising considering the cost of property in SF / Bay Area)