There's an ongoing "all the big liberal cities are scary" vibe in much media that's been internalized by a large proportion of the population.

I know multiple people (and have myself experienced this) who've been greeted with warnings and concern from relatives when traveling to major cities... when those cities have violent crime rates far lower than the places they/we live. Like, a fifth as much or lower. It's still "common knowledge" that e.g. Manhattan is way more dangerous than a "safe" red state suburban/exurban county (LOL, very not necessarily true) and that the largest cities must be way more dangerous than small and mid-sized cities (also very not necessarily true).

As someone who lived in NYC all the way from the early 80s up until 2 years ago and still has to travel there regularly for business, NYC is a lot closer to how it was in the mid-80s than any other point during that period.

Especially post-9/11 up until COVID it was practically Disneyland. You had little chance of being a victim of random crime in the vast majority of city neighborhoods or on the subway. That's certainly not true anymore. (Caveat: In 2009 I was drive-by shot at on gang initiation night on 96th St & Columbus Ave in Manhattan. Yes, it happened, but place and time are important factors.)

Also we've seen a return of large storefront vacancy numbers in Manhattan.

Where I live now people truly do not lock their doors. Most garage doors in my neighborhood stay open 24/7.

I think to some degree the problem is a combo of some overestimating among part of the population (driven in part by recall of actual historical crime rates, and by anti-"blue"-city news media) of how dangerous big cities are, but also a huge failure to appreciate how dangerous lots of non-big-city places in the US are. It's not entirely that big US cities are necessarily super-safe (they're largely not, if you compare to international peers) but that lots of non-big-city parts of the US are shockingly dangerous, including many parts that folks don't expect to be.

> Where I live now people truly do not lock their doors. Most garage doors in my neighborhood stay open 24/7.

Rich suburban and small towns—and I mean where the whole area's kinda rich, not just a few neighborhoods—are in fact the sort of safe that lots of people incorrectly assume all suburbs and small towns are. I know how it is, I (now) live in one of those too, so Manhattan is in-fact more dangerous than where I am (these days). :-)

Like, my kid's neurologist lives just up our street and there's a country club every half mile, it seems like. Yeah, this particular place is quite safe. Go figure, if there's vanishingly little poverty around there's also very little violent crime.

We're not that rich here. We're just in a permissive firearm state with a high rate of military service. The houses here are average, but my neighbors are active and retired military, retired cops, the state governor's official security detail, lots of tradespeople etc.

There's a trailer park 2 minutes down the road and lots of small family farms here.

Check the crime stats. You might be surprised. Exceptions exist, but... they're exceptions. My 5x-Manahattan's-violent-crime-rate former home county pretty well fit that description, and many locals believed it was quite safe. The stats tell another story.

Oh I know there's crime here in my city, but it doesn't reach my neighborhood.

Also the thing is the vast majority of the crime here is targeted. It's violence between gangs/drug dealers. It will never have anything to do with me.

But in NY and Chicago (especially Chicago) I know lots of average, unaffiliated people who have been robbed at gunpoint. Also large amounts of crime in NY goes unreported because people mind their business and/or don't trust the cops. They literally have had a "if you see something, say something" campaign for most of my life for this reason.

I've literally seen people step over people who were bleeding out from stab wounds in the NYC subway. I witnessed multiple violent crimes while living in NYC.

> Also large amounts of crime in NY goes unreported because people mind their business and/or don't trust the cops.

Yes, crime stats are a mess for a bunch of reasons. The most-reliable are murder stats, because they rarely go unreported or otherwise unnoticed, and are the hardest to "juke the stats" on, especially if you try to do it for more than a brief span of time. Those are better in scary ol' Manhattan than in much of "safe" small town, small city, and suburban America, and often way better.

per-capita. NYC still has like 400-500 murders a year. That's a small area. That's as many as happen in my whole state.

How many people in said state?

Close to that of NYC.

So a roughly similar population has a roughly similar murder rate? Why would this be surprising?

Sooo… just as safe then?

... but per-capita is 100% of what matters when assessing risk...?

[EDIT] Assessing risk based on course crime stats, I mean. Of course individual context and situations matter a lot, too.

Not really. Proximity is important. It influences how many people are going to be affected by it.

Getting murdered on my front lawn is a lot different than getting murdered in the lobby of a housing complex with 1000 people living in it.

Density is even more important when considering random crime because you have even more people who will be potential victims when someone is targeting an area.

> Density is even more important when considering random crime because you have even more people who will be potential victims when someone is targeting an area.

This is true—it's why rural towns and small cities are often really dangerous, while the overall state they're in might not have high violent crime stats, if a large proportion of the state's population isn't in towns or cities at all. Living far away from people is an effective way to avoid crime.

In 2024, what you're describing is rich. The neighbors you describe feel like they have a place in society. They had (and likely continue to have!) a steady and decent government income, rather than the continual screw turning of the corporate-inflationary wealth extraction machine. They all have assets to lose if their kids were to step out of line. Their specific jobs also provided them with the non-monetary benefit of firearms and other defensive training that would have otherwise cost ~ten thousand dollars of discretionary income to learn on its own. Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're on the pleasant side of the bifurcating society.

Per capita tells the real story. I'd take Chicago or New York over any small town in, say, rural Mississippi or Alabama[1]. Yet [certain] media's "big liberal cities = bad" narrative continues...

1: https://www.police1.com/ambush/articles/10-us-counties-with-...

There's a long-running genre of clickbaity story (that's been around since before "clickbait") that runs something like "America's five most dangerous cities!" and reads like the list of places many people believe are exceptionally-dangerous in the US (because of these stories...) but people consistently read them poorly (and media know this, so are basically lying on purpose, but big city names being on the list gets more attention, for multiple reasons, than if the list were mostly small cities).

The rhetorical trick here is the cut-off point. For one thing, you're limiting it to cities in the first place. For another, take a look to see where their cut-off for size of city under consideration is—the higher it is, the more it'll skew toward big names (duh) so they almost always set it pretty high, and the lower you make the cut-off, the farther (most) of those plummet down and off the list as small and mid-sized cities take over.

It's wild the tales [certain] media outlets tell. When I moved to Chicago, I got no end of suggestions to buy a gun, get bulletproof glass for my car, increase my life insurance policy...

Sure, the deep south and west sides might be not be too nice (particularly at night), but that's mostly gangs shooting at each other. My neighborhood is actually quite nice, but even if you take the city as a whole, the violent crime rate is 639.7 per 100,000 people [0] or 5.38 per 1,000 [1], depending on what source you go by (but I'll just use the 639.7 figure since that actually makes the city look worse). Compare this to Houston, TX: 11.35 per 1,000 people [2], Dallas, TX: 7.71 per 1,000 [3], or Nashville, TN: 10.95 per 1,000 [4].

So, 0.006397 (Chicago) vs 0.01135 (Houston) vs 0.00771 (Dallas) vs 0.01095 (Nashville). Hmmm...seems like Chicago is slightly more peaceful than Dallas, I'm 1.77x more likely to be the victim of a violent crime in Houston, and 1.71x more likely in Nashville. One has to wonder, if Chicago is apparently a warzone, why [certain] media outlets aren't equating Houston and Nashville to Fallujah.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Chicago

[1]: https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/il/chicago/crime

[2]: https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/tx/houston/crime

[3]: https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/tx/dallas/crime

[4]: https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/tn/nashville/crime

> Rich suburban and small towns—and I mean where the whole area's kinda rich, not just a few neighborhoods—are in fact the sort of safe that lots of people incorrectly assume all suburbs and small towns are. I know how it is, I (now) live in one of those too, so Manhattan is in-fact more dangerous than where I am (these days). :-)

Literally no.

Where I grew up was below median household income and remains that way today (most of it by a good amount) and was by every literal metric safe.

Not every small town or small/midsize city or suburb is notably dangerous. Some are safe. Some are even safe and arguably also poor—poor-small-town Vermont, to take an example, tends to be more than a tad statistically different from poor-small-town Arkansas, say, if you want to carve out a whole category of poorish-small-town that may be relatively safe. And anywhere, exceptions may exist.

A whole shitload of them have much higher murder rates than NYC and several other "bad" big cities, though, and it's just about never the rich places of that sort that are high-crime (go figure). Yet, for folks who live in those demonstrably-dangerous places and travel, local members of their family commonly freak out about their visiting big cities that are, statistically, a lot safer than the place they're leaving to make the visit. This is due to wild misperceptions of where the dangerous parts of the US are—some are in big cities, but a lot aren't, and many of the "bad" big cities are actually relatively safe, if you compare them to smaller cities and towns.

What I meant is that if you want to look at small towns and suburbs and consistently find ones that are safe, you're going to want to limit your search to the relatively rich ones. That's a category that largely does fit the assumptions of safety that people have for small towns and suburbs in general (which assumption holds... less well, with a wider net cast)

I'm still waiting for someone to name me a major American city that isn't a blue city. If every major city is blue, then there isn't anything to compare it to. At least NY has had a couple of Republican mayors this century, but I doubt the same could be said of San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia or Boston.

Big cities will naturally have more crime than little villages, but as someone else mentioned, per capita stats are key.

people in your neighborhood leave garage doors open overnight? never heard of this. seems like you'd want to keep wildlife out at minimum.

Anecdotally one of my colleagues recently moved from W. Va to the CA and his entire family are constantly fearful for his family because they have been conditioned to think liberal cities (and even CA in general) is a crime-infested cesspit. Like his whole family is praying for him weekly - even many months after the move.

My ex-home red state has double the murder rate of NYC. Not New York State, the city. DOUBLE. The stats where I actually lived were even worse (and I lived in one of the better counties in my area).

Nonetheless, always the tedious ritual of warnings and concern when I traveled to any "real" city. Like, guys, save that shit for when I'm coming back. I should be warning you, I'm leaving danger. And please stop watching cable news and listening to AM radio.

And it's likely even worse if you include traffic deaths. NYC is actually one of the safest places in the entire country https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-11-18/how-ar...

> There's an ongoing "all the big liberal cities are scary" vibe in much media that's been internalized by a large proportion of the population.

Accurate perception, from someone who is in NYC routinely. How people manage to rationalize the amount of pure third-world nonsense and depravity that is ubiquitous in American cities today is beyond me.

I will believe this if you show me the stats. You can use homicide rates, since they're hard to fake or badly under-report, and since many of the other stats crime stats also look pretty good for NYC and I expect you'll dismiss them as extremely incorrect—and it's not unreasonable to worry that they might be, so, you can just use the homicide rates.

Maybe one "scary" big city is managing to do hide far-worse homicide rates than they actually have. Are a bunch of them? Maybe, I guess, I doubt it but maybe. If a bunch of them are successfully hiding a lot of murders, though—are towns and small or mid-sized cities in poorer states just unable to hide theirs as effectively, since they are often really high?

Of course, you do see more crime with higher density and with a higher proportion of travel on foot rather than by highway. That doesn't necessarily equate to higher risk.

maybe crimes besides homicides affect people as well? Like, I dunno, burglary, say.

Homicides are useful because if you use anything else the "nuh uh, it's impossible that (for example) NYC is safer than lots of other places" contingent will just point out (correctly!) that there are massive problems with crime stat collection and so the ones in the statistically-not-that-bad big cities must be faked [EDIT: or, at least, very inaccurate for other reasons] and the ones in the statistically-worse smaller cities and towns are simply not, or are less, faked (this part doesn't necessarily follow, but they're not wrong that it might be true)

Homicides are harder to hide, and are far less likely to go unreported, than other crimes.

The other useful route is victimization surveys. They introduce other issues, but the trade-off is well worth it for evading stats-juking or underreporting. Not a cure-all depending on the topic[1] but pretty good. I believe you'll also find NYC and some other perceived-by-many as especially-risky cities fall off the higher part of top-crime-city lists with this metric applied, when we lower the bar of what we're calling a "city" to include small and mid-sized ones.

Here's a fun one (check the study linked near the top if you want the source—the article's kinda ass, but the charts are handy) that attempts to use per-capita cost of crime to sort of normalize for overall severity of crime ("is double the overall crime rate really worse if 100% of those are pickpocketing and 100% of the 'lower'-crime city crimes are murder?", to illustrate the problem by exaggerated example) and does include smaller cities (broken out from the 300ish ones the study classifies as "large"):

https://thehill.com/homenews/nexstar_media_wire/4366668-thes...

(Some large cities are very dangerous and have crime problems! This source confirms that and I do not deny it! The goofy part is that, if you live in certain places and around certain sorts of people, they'll get super-worried about you when travel to ones that simply aren't that bad, and these same folks would never think to worry if you tell them you're visiting, say, Saginaw, MI, or Pine Bluff, AR, but, apparently, they should worry—hell, this whole illustrative exercise probably plays out in Saginaw regularly, I guarantee there are people there who tell their families "hey, cool news, I'm going to NYC for a week" and many of their family members get really worried about their safety)

[1] Picking up on sexual assaults with victimization surveys can be especially tricky. There are two main factors at play, one of which is simply that people are a less likely to report a sexual assault even in an anonymous poll than they are other crimes, and the other is that you'll get super-different results if you ask people whether they've been the victim of a sexual assault or rape, versus asking them whether they've experienced something that, as described, definitely legally qualifies as a sexual assault or rape—that is, a lot more people have factually experienced something that qualifies as SA or rape, than regard themselves as having been victims of those crimes, so... which thing are you trying to capture? Incidence rate of behavior that qualifies, or rate at which people regard themselves as being victims of that behavior? You need a different approach for each.

nice comment to make every here know you may have seen NYC on a postcard once or twice in your life :)

My brother once told my mother to warn me about "Protests" in my city around the time that Portland Oregon was having it's fun. The vibe he sold her was a busy protest crowding through the streets shouting slogans and clashes with police.

The actual protest was about ten people laying on the ground in front of the police station in silence. There were a couple cops standing in front of the building, presumably slightly less bored than doing paperwork at their desk. Most people in my city didn't even know it happened.

It's insane the reality they live in. These people will see https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.... and chuckle and say how bad the "mainstream media" is and then go back to watching Fox News scream about how a liberal city is on fire with protests despite NOTHING HAPPENING. I can't understand the willful, intentional ignorance that leads people to believe watching an hour of Fox News makes them knowledgeable about a city of a million people.

Sure, but there's a lot of speculation that it was a wronged customer. It could have been someone he works with. It could have been someone from his personal life. People who are not Healthcare CEO's also are murdered, there are lots of possible motives.

We don't even know that the killer got the right person.

> We don't even know that the killer got the right person.

The rest I agree with but this part we know, right? CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are not randomly gunned down... It 100% could have been anyone that committed this crime but they 100% got the right person...

> CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are not randomly gunned down...

Why not? I don't think random chance really cares about a person's occupation, it's just more unlikely because there are fewer of them.

There's literally propaganda on Fox News going on right now blaming or at least connecting this to undocumented migrants.

https://bsky.app/profile/justinbaragona.bsky.social/post/3lc...