The big cities are the ones most known for being terrible because they're big: reputational risk is always higher for bigger organizations than small ones, because it's easier to be aware of the problems in one big org than twenty small ones that add up to the same size.

This is because we extrapolate any incident within the big org to apply to the whole organization, whereas we obviously don't extrapolate out incidents in small orgs to apply to different small orgs.

So if you have 1 big police department with 5 fatal shootings, and 20 small police departments with 5 fatal shootings in total, all in different departments, people will think, "wow, that big police department is trash, but 15 out of the 20 small police departments are good! Small police departments are so much better!"