> Lately there has been a resurgence, especially in the political right, of the cities are dangerous mantra. It seems pretty odd to me.

Urban violence (such as in Chicago and Minneapolis) might have something to do with it.

[0] https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-police-homicides-murder-repo...

[1] https://www.startribune.com/staggering-surge-in-violent-carj...

I haven't looked at data in a while, but I am pretty sure those places are safer than they were in the 80s.

If cities have become more dangerous in recent years, people will notice and change their behavior. It doesn’t matter that today’s cities haven’t matched their historic peak, only that they’re worse than they were ten years ago.

Furthermore, a non-trivial number of people are just looking for reasons to move out of cities right now. Consider that many cities that we consider "elite" were losing population well into the 1990s. There's nothing written in stone about college-educated young people continuing to migrate to cities (which is pretty much the demographic that has moved the numbers) as they have over the past 20 years or so.

> If cities have become more dangerous in recent years, people will notice and change their behavior.

Dubious.

Certainly, behavior is driven by perception of danger, but whether perception of danger generally tracks with actual danger or not is…less certain.

I know for child abduction and child assaults by those outside of the family that has historically not been the case; and perceived danger has increased as media focus increased despite decreasing actual danger, for several decades in a row.

I don’t see why similar (or opposite, if media focussed shifted away while actual danger increased) trends would occur with other forms of danger.

I stated that if cities become more dangerous, people will change their behavior. A case of people changing their behavior even though cities aren’t more dangerous isn’t really a counterexample. A valid counterexample would be a case of cities becoming more dangerous and people not changing their behavior.

> A case of people changing their behavior even though cities aren’t more dangerous isn’t really a counterexample

It wasn't presented as a counterexample, it was presented as grounds for doubting the mechanism for the effect you describe.

Increased danger -> increased perceived danger -> behavior which attempts to mitigate danger is a nice theory, but it relies on deltas in perceived danger corresponding to deltas in actual danger.

If deltas in perceived danger that manifestly do drive behavior are driven by processes that are independent of actual danger, your argument no longer makes sense.

Thats entirely possible and it probably wouldn't be seen to rebut the right-wing narrative that "cities are dangerous" to tell them "you should see how dangerous cities used to be."

You don’t have to compare urban to urban. In the early 90s, rate of violent crime in rural and suburban areas were far higher than what you now see in Chicago and Milwaukee. Not a surprise when you look at figure 1 of https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv19.pdf

Reply All Podcast, ep 127/128 seemed to claim it's actually not that much better in NYC now. Instead they claim the way of reporting crimes has changed to make the numbers look better than they actually are

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/o2hx34

I listened to that a few years ago. I don't believe it makes exactly the claim as your summary.

In discussions about New York there is a popular myth that policing caused the crime rate drop, and I think that is what the podcast was challenging. Not necessarily that there wasn't a drop at all. There was across the entire country. Not for the reasons some police departments would like to believe.

IIRC, the reason the LA heist in the early 90s was so important was that it showed how poorly the police were armed compared to the robbers. That led to a lot of policy changes, I believe.

I believe you are correct, but the real issue was not the firearms the robbers were using, but rather the penetrating power of the police firearms against the robbers' body armor[1]. Because they were both wearing body armor, the two bank robbers were shot a total of 40 times without being killed. (One shot himself and the other bled to death).

Police at that point were mostly using 9mm pistols, .38 caliber revolvers, and 12 gauge shotguns, none of which were capable of penetrating the body armor. More heavily armed police such as SWAT were using MP5s, which shot 9mm as well.

The robbery lead to the distribution of higher velocity firearms like the M16 among the LAPD, and a similar incident in Miami lead to the adoption of the 10mm pistol cartridge by thy FBI.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150702091610/http://www.police...

Love it when my local police force gets jealous of the most badass robbery ever televised and decides to go full militarization and then the entire country follows suit.

some cities have been trending upwards in murders over the last decade. Baltimore had almost as many murders in 2019, 2017, and 2015 as it had in 1993, the all time high. the population was significantly larger then, making the 2019 rate the highest it's ever been.