There's a trailer park 2 minutes down the road and lots of small family farms here.
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.
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.
[EDIT] Assessing risk based on course crime stats, I mean. Of course individual context and situations matter a lot, too.
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.
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.
1: https://www.police1.com/ambush/articles/10-us-counties-with-...
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.
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
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.
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)
Big cities will naturally have more crime than little villages, but as someone else mentioned, per capita stats are key.
> 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.