US cities are plenty safe. The fact that you think otherwise is propaganda you’ve been successfully served. I live in Nyc and visit other cities often.
The subway was extremely hostile. People were regularly drugged out of their mind. I saw one guy try to drink a Coca Cola upside down and spilled it all in the bus. Another crazy chased my limited mobility Estonian friend who wanted to visit nyc alongside me when she went alone for groceries.
Could it be that your frame of reference is broken and/or you’re numb to it?
The most recent incident was a few weeks ago on Q train, where a seated man was screaming at the woman across from him (who was trying to do her best to ignore him), how he was gonna kill her and "the rest of her people" (whatever that means).
But please tell me how stuff like this never happens.
And I am not even a subway hater overall, I take it daily, and it is my preferred method of transportation. And no, I am not taking subway into deep and shady parts of bronx or brooklyn, as heavy majority of my rides are contained between Dekalb/Jay St Metrotech (aka dt brooklyn) and midtown.
It just sounds like crazy talk to me, when someone claims that the safety cams in subway cars are not, at least, somewhat helpful. At least newer A/C train cars have those cams now, and, I hope, it will lead to prosecution of serial subway harassers.
Table 8
Rate of victimization, by type of crime and location of residence, 2020 and 2021
Location of residence
Total violent crime Violent crime excluding simple assault Total property crime
2020 2021* 2020 2021* 2020 2021*
Urban 19.0 † 24.5 7.7 9.7 158.9 157.5
Suburban 16.8 16.5 5.6 5.2 90.5 86.8
Rural 13.4 11.1 4.5 4.4 65.6 57.7
You can see clearly that urban has the highest rate of crime, and this has been true for decades.[1]
Also, many crimes are not recorded at all in NYC, which is why many stores have locked down all their items with a key that requires permission from a staff member to access. I haven't seen this in the small towms I've been to.
[0] https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv21.pdf
[1] https://ovc.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh226/files/ncvrw2018/...
Same with 2024: https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/cv24.pdf
Also my second link from my first post showed higher Urban Victimization rates in urban areas in every year from 1995 to 2015.
See the DSA candidates in the recent elections including the major - they explicitly state they do not support prison sentences and in many cases do not believe in police.
I think the only objective conclusion we can come to in a comments section is that going by “I visited there” vibes isn’t going to be useful.
https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Uni...
So when it comes to concerns of safety, I’m going to trust the recorded homicide rate much more than whatever metrics feed into numbeo’s index. And NYC has a homicide rate nearly three times as high as either London or Paris. That’s much better than many cities in America, which can surpass 5 or even 10 murders per 100k residents a year, but it’s still more dangerous than most European cities and substantially so.
For example, from 2019 to 2022 car thefts skyrocketed while other property crimes declined. Mostly because people figured out that Kia’s during that time were really easy to steal.
> Most other crimes suffer from differences in classification/definition, reporting procedures, or willingness of residents to report them to the police.
From what I can tell they use victim impact surveys and other surveys as well as crime reported to police to ameliorate that.
>homicide rate
Your theory is called the tip of the iceberg theory and it isn’t meritless but it isn’t very reliable either.
Different studies show different correlations between murder and different types of violent crime.
But the correlation in general is only moderate even within a country. Across counties, it’s much lower.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43576-023-00086-1
In the US guns are much more common, than in Europe, so so a crime like attempted murder that is highly correlated with murder within the US isn’t going to be highly correlated across the US and Europe.
For example, if it takes 3 attempted murders in a city with easy gun access to produce 1 murder, it might take 10 in a city where guns are hard to get. So you could be underestimating the attempted murder rate in that city by 3x.