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Comment by reducesuffering | Hacker News Reader

My argument is clear about how ridiculous absolute values of crime pertain to how safe it is for someone. That you instead want to nitpick the exact # of murders in NYC (when I just winged a 3 per 100k at 8m population) is indicative that you can't refute it and your original assertion is incorrect.

If anything, the real # in 2023 of 386 only further proves my point. That it's ridiculous to assert even that many more murders is less safe than Stockton, CA.

Safety is about "am I more or less likely to have something happen to me" and no one is thinking that means moving to the tiniest country of 2,000 people where only 10 murders happened in the entire country last year.

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Apologies, I wasn't aware you were making up numbers. That isn't useful, or helpful in conversation in my opinion, but clearly you feel strongly that's a reasonable thing to do.

I contend it is significantly safer in the majority of cities in the US than New York City.

His argument remains valid with the correct number, proving that his made up number was close enough.

You're factually wrong.

Like everyone else here I'm having trouble parsing what you're trying to say.

You seem to be implying per capita is a bad measure of safety. But you're not being clear why. Can you elaborate?

I didn't realize you need the exact #'s to understand an argument. Now that I've provided NYC's, and Stockton's is 34 in 2019, does it make any difference? No.

Your conclusion is without any evidence and is in fact, wrong, based on the crime metrics we can easily compare.

It's quite uncanny that it's the people who most fear crime, think they're going to something like "stay the hell away from crime infested NYC" and proceed to move somewhere where they're more likely to be affected by crime.

Affected and “victim of” are different. Higher population densities mean more people are affected by a murder (more witnesses, more people disrupted by the crime scene, more people that go ‘I go to that train stop every day, that could have been me’).

Rational or not, proximity of crime freaks some people out much more than probability of being the victim.

Isnt it the case that the people most scared of cities are the ones who dont live there?

Yes, there is a correlation with people who don’t like cities for any reason (not just crime) and living away from them.

Yes there is a good case to be made for density causing crime to be more in your periphery while not targeting you. But I assume we’re talking about actual physical safety, not the perception of safety.

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