Ok, here's my not cherrypicked experience: The issue is massively overblown. It's nowhere near as bad as the sour-grapes living elsewhere would have you believe.
I agree with you that crime stats can be politicized, but it's equally sketchy to consider n=1 anecdotes as more reliable indicators. Certainly if you yourself experience or are the victim of crime at some particular rate and intensity, then that's suggestive to you, personally. It's entirely logical to make decisions about your own life -- like moving to a safer neighborhood, or avoiding areas in the city where you've experienced crime -- but it's not particularly useful when talking about the city as a whole, or in making general recommendations to residents on how to be safe.
Statistics also don't collect how many annoying people are blasting shitty music on subways or how many morons are rolling coal in lifted trucks. There are unpleasant people everywhere.
Minor crimes like murder?
In that case, statistics should still be useful to observe trends, if they can't be used to determine accurate absolute numbers. We should expect the same percentage of people to not report crime when there are 1,000 car break-ins per month as when there are 100. Say that's 20%; seeing that number change from 200 to 20 is still teaches you about how crime rates change.
Besides, we're talking about murder, here, and I would suspect that pretty much every murder ends up accounted for in the statistics. Contrary to what mafia movies would like us to believe, it's not that easy to hide a body indefinitely.
> The problem is that official statistics are worse than useless because most victims of minor crimes never file police reports.
While urine smells certainly affect quality of life, I'm not convinced this particular statistic is all that relevant when talking about crime or public safety.
This ignores changes in police enforcement and prosecution of crimes. If there is very little overall crime and the police have the time to find the perpetrator, and the prosecutor agrees to bring charges, you're more likely to report the crime. If there is high crime, police are too swamped to deal with yet another break-in, and the DA is too busy dropping felonies to misdemeanors or not bringing charges at all, then people aren't going to bother reporting crime as much anymore.
That's definitely not true for car break-ins. In California pretty much every one I knew who lived there experienced some form of car break-in, and of course nobody got their stuff back. If I experienced one there I'd just shrug it off as a fact of life since the process of filing a police report takes time and effort, and the reward is expected to be zero.
In other places with fewer break-ins, I will most likely respond differently.
So there could be a 50% decrease in violent crime in the most dangerous part of a city, along with a 500% increase in non-violent or petty crimes everywhere else: shoplifting, parked car smash-and-grabs, urinating in the train stations, pooping on the sidewalks, etc. So the tech crowd isn't going to notice fewer people getting murdered in the worst section of town, but they'll definitely see the other stuff.
Statistics can be useful, not useful, or misleading. Nothing about them is inherently meaningful or valuable--it depends entirely on the question and process generating the data and statistic. GIGO applies.
Despite the meme that an anecdote isn't data, it actually is no different from data from the Bayesian point of view. It is an n=1 posterior with a prior of one's past life experiences. And many anecdotes together can be thought of as a multi-level model (if you don't believe this, just see what the methodology of many behavioral/observational studies looks like--it's collating anecdotes into "data"--including the crime statistics that you are after).
> the anecdote is a powerful emotional narrative that feels true
And researchers can absolutely be emotional! A study biased by the emotions and beliefs of a researcher will produce biased results. Statistics isn't an escape hatch from human bias; it actually compounds whatever bias exists in the first place.
However, this comment is falling into the exact situation that OP was trying to warn about. You are using an anecdote to dismiss statistics because the anecdote is a powerful emotional narrative that feels true. It is after all your own personal experience. However, that experience might not be an accurate representation of reality. OP warned to keep that in mind. Your response is effectively saying "no, my emotional narrative feels true so I'm sticking with it."
Maybe you are right and your emotional narrative is true. As I said, I don't know. But I'll tell you if one side of a debate has statistics and the other side has feelings, I think it is smart to side with the side that has statistics.