Hacker News Reader

Memphis had 63.9 homicides per 100,000 people in 2023.

I don't have stats for individual Chinese cities, but China's rate is 0.46 per 100,000 people. In China, it's plausible that the cities are safer than the countryside, and I don't think that Beijing's number is substantially higher than the national average.

Basically, you are 139x more likely to be murdered in Memphis.

View on HN

Factor out the domestic violence, bar fights, and gang activity, and how many of these are random people minding their own business that happen to get shot for walking around at midnight? Probably zero I'm guessing.

It’s comical that you are comparing Memphis to China. But lets take this even further and increase our sample set from just Jan 2023 - Dec 2023, to Jan 1923 - Dec 2023, this is more indicative of the downsides of authoritarianism, and clearly shows Memphis as less homicidal than China.

> more indicative of the downsides of authoritarianism

Look at the trends and think about what you're saying. What you're calling "authoritarianism" (very vaguely defined) has brought order from chaos. I don't know if there's a single large American city that is now safer than Beijing. Sure, things were different in 1960. "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com