“Absolute level of safety” what does this even mean? Per capita crime rates seem quite relevant to this underlying property and can be well defined.
That said, I understand the desire to frame crime in the absolute. Either you’re the 1 guy who gets unlucky and experiences a crime in your small town, or there are 999 people like you in the big city). Crime is a problem of scale, and a bigger scale freaks people out even if the coefficients are the same.
Majority of murders are among people who know each other. You personal risk is all about who your partner is, who your friends are, how much aggressive your uncle is. A guy you never met that is just about to murder his wife has nothing to do with your personal risk.
It freaks out people who live elsewhere and all they know of cities is what they see on cable news, especially a certain channel.
> There’s a psychological reason (rational or not) people equate cities with violence
Maybe it's simply that it's repeated at them endlessly - a simple, effective tactic used by conservatives for decades.
I lived in NYC for 20 years, people who live there too long develop stockholm syndrome excusing the shit that goes on on a daily basis. Every new yorker experiences it given enough time.
The common saying is that when a 'transplant' moves and starts questioning the filfth, noise, qol issues and minor crime they are told to go back to Ohio.
I used to be that person , then I realized that living in an environment where you excuse this behavior as normal... is not normal.
So you can spread your message of "statistically safe" as much as you want but everyone knows that new yorkers put up with a different amount of s*t than most.
Lots of NYers love living there, obviously - they are willing to pay far more for the privilege (another objective fact). You dismissing their preferences is just one person's baseless speculation.