That's a pretty good take on the data (it's incredible how bad Baltimore is).
But we already knew that people worry about getting held up at gunpoint in the big city, but not so much about crashing their car on the way to the big night out (or even worse, on the way home).
I live in a small village and there is currently discussion going on about extending the legal amount of time a person can keep holiday decorations on their house. On one side are the folks that think Christmas lights are way too tacky in February or March and on the other side are the folks that say the weather could easily make it too dangerous to get them down within time limits (never mind how dumb and overbearing it is to have time limits in the first place). I lived in Chicago for 20 years and some people had holiday lights on their million dollar condo balconies year round - because it is never safe to take them down lol (kidding).
> I live in a small village and there is currently discussion going on about extending the legal amount of time a person can keep holiday decorations on their house.
The need for some people to police *everything* is exhausting.
It's mystifying - I can't imagine having this much energy period, let alone devoting it to being a negative in other people's lives.
I feel similarly about Putin invading Ukraine. How do you get up in the morning so motivated and full of energy to order kids to go massacre other kids? I can barely muster the juice to write a few lines of code and hit the gym.
A lot of it is a bunch of people paid to work 50 weeks a year making sure they have “something” to do. So they advocate for anything and everything under the sun to make those hours count.
I've lived in/near NYC, Baltimore, Boston, and Philly. Baltimore's the only one where I've been mugged (at gunpoint no less), or really robbed at all. Also someone was murdered in the building across the street from my apartment, in a botched home invasion. And I lived in one of the "better" neighborhoods.
Baltimore has an amazing creative scene (music/art/film/etc) and great food, and I actually really enjoyed living there, but the safety issue is quite serious.
I don't think the problem is insurmountable though. I'm surprised whenever I visit Washington DC in recent years, because DC used to be even more dangerous than Baltimore, but you'd never know it today.
NYC is on the complete opposite side of the spectrum. 15 years here and I've never had a serious incident, and I'm struggling to even think of anything major affecting any of my friends too.
NYC is remarkably safe, and it could still be easily safer: 124 pedestrians died after being hit by cars in 2021[1], and 2022 looks like it'll continue the trend. The city has a clearance rate of just 3% for hit-and-runs, despite the extraordinary amount of money we've gifted the NYPD for comprehensive surveillance.
Anecdotally, I see much more petty disregard for traffic laws by cars (including large vans and trucks) than I did before COVID.
124 pedestrians in one of the most walked cities in the world, with a total population of 8.38 million, an additional 2+ million daily work commuters, tourists, and other visitors?
I don't think this is true. Even if we take somewhere ridiculously tourist-foot-traffic heavy likes Times Square, 2021 was still well below 2018 and 2019[1].
I don't think I agree with their definition of external causes. Getting caught in a lawn mower or a death due to your own driving isn't an external cause in the same way that homicide is.
Yes, that feels like an unnecessary broadening on their part. The data (second graph) already makes the point for them: NYC did better on murder rates than everywhere except fringe counties in 2020, and even beat them in the years before.
If you drive (or mow) recklessly, you are at a heightened risk of death, but it is still a pretty random occurrence. If not, you have a much lower risk, and it is still pretty random should it actually occur.
If you are involved in gang or other criminal behavior, you are a heightened risk of death, but it is still a pretty random occurrence. If not, you have a much lower risk, and it is still pretty random should it actually occur.
I think it is pretty fair to lump them in together.
If you drive or mow recklessly, you suffer the results of your own choices. If you get mugged or shot on a city street, you've suffered the result of someone else's choices. Many experience more angst over the choices outside their control. I can't say I blame them.
And yet people have very little angst getting out on a road filled with other people poorly driving massive overpowered vehicles at high rates of speed.
You are more likely to die sure. But this is kind of lying with statistics. Cars are a huge issue though that are largely ignored in society, which I won't dispute. BUT lets look at what people talk about when they say safe. They don't necessarily mean just that they won't be murdered or not. But also if they will randomly be jumped, robbed, burgled, punched in the knock out game or hit with a brick, etc. Non-violent crime, and violent but not murder crime is probably much higher in the cities.
I haven't seen data on this, but my intuition is the opposite: that all violent crime would tend to be correlated with the murder rate. That's partly because any violent crime can easily escalate to a murder. Maybe I'm wrong though. I'm not finding a clear answer with some cursory googling, but I'd imagine this has been studied.
Outside of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder rate was highly correlated with the violent crime rate. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became less correlated as more people died due to a lack of available emergency healthcare while hospital systems were overloaded.
There’s also enough variance in how things get classified by police departments that a lot of studies just end up counting murder and manslaughter since those are pretty standard and hard to fudge.
That said, if you ignore NY, Central counties of large metro lead the way in homocide and therefore would likely lead the way in non letal violence. The country and fringe suburbs are much safer on average from homicide by there on measure.
It is only when you add in other causes you see deaths in the country rise.
It's a really good question. If I were to guess I would think that one factor would be cost of living pushing high-risk individuals out of the city. Violent crime is closely tied to economic status. Maybe there's some big policy wins in there too but that is where I would start.
High population density seems like another likely factor. In a lot of NYC, and especially in Manhattan, there are people out on the streets at all hours. I assume that discourages crime.
It’s cars that scare me and I’m not afraid of being killed. Car violence strikes pretty much at random. Homicide victims usually did something that enhanced their risk. You can cut your chances of being killed by orders of magnitude simply by not being a criminal or associating with criminals. There is no corresponding action you can take to be safe from road accidents.
>There is no corresponding action you can take to be safe from road accidents.
I think you can cut your chances of being killed in a road accident significantly by controlling your alcohol intake and using common sense. Something like 60% of pedestrian road deaths are intoxicated pedestrians.
By the same hand, a very high % of those murder victims were probably engaged in some criminal activity or the victim of intimate partner violence, both of which are not particularly worrisome to me.
> Something like 60% of pedestrian road deaths are intoxicated pedestrians.
Do you have a source for this? I looked up your claim and found this study from the NHTSA[0] (pg 23), which does say that 60% of pedestrians hit have a BAC over 0.08; the catch is, that number is specifically for crashes which occur between 12:00AM and 3:00AM.
From pg 26 - "Of the pedestrians involved [in fatal crashes across all hours], 33 percent were intoxicated, with a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.08 grams per deciliter (g/dl) or greater."
Since the NHSTA study I linked was conducted in 2001, it's possible that new information has been made available in recent years; if that is the case and that's where your data comes from, feel free to link.
I think you have the right numbers. I was just going off the top of my head based on last time I looked at it.
For some reason your link isn't working, but I was using this report[1]
33% percent of pedestrians were intoxicated, which matches your number.
Another 16% of the pedestrians were on freeways or interstates.
There is no number, but I would guess using a smartphone when crossing streets and not using cross walks are also big risk factors.
I say this not to "blame the victim" but point out that if someone is concerned about being hit by a car, there are a number of simple steps that the pedestrian can take to drastically reduce their risk.
> Homicide victims usually did something that enhanced their risk
Like... take the subway in NYC [1]? Homicide victims in normal cities that don't have mentally deranged homeless roaming the streets usually did something that enhanced their risk. Homicide victims in NYC... had the unfortunate luck to be selected by mentally ill homeless that should have been institutionalized.
This is a weird example to respond with, since there's no homicide. The woman didn't die.
So far, in 2022, there have been 4 homicides on the NYC subway. Considering that about 3 million people ride it each weekday (which, in turn, is far below the pre-COVID numbers), I'll take my chances versus our national car deaths statistics.
However people might feel (and they might feel less safe!) does not detract from the raw factuality that the subway is extremely safe. If people died and were maimed on America's highways at the rate they are in NYC's subways, we'd save tens of thousands of lives and livelihoods yearly.
> How many attempted homicides, attempted muggings, stalkings, etc. are there that never get reported?
Do you have a source indicating that NYC underreports these crimes uniquely, and not merely that they're generally underreported? Our police are generally zealous when it comes to violent crime statistics, since it allows them to pump the Fear Machine and keep public support up.
There's a certain, urm, unique element of gangs that disproportionately lives in large cities like NYC and those people like to keep their business as their business (even as victims of violence) and not police business. I'm not sure how much difference it makes but I'd find it to believe there's not a huge amount of gang crime that doesn't get reported, and disproportionally so.
I'm sure most of their deaths end up getting found out sooner or later, if they're someone who will be missed. Anything lesser probably ain't gonna be found out if it's gang on gang. This is the kind of stuff that you can kind of 'feel in the air' but can't prove because no gang is going to let Professor Squiggles nerd up on his sociology study during the next hit.
* “Like NYC” is doing a lot of work here. NYC has organized crime, but not a lot of violent organized crime anymore. There’s a reason the handwringing over MS-13 focused on the suburbs of Long Island and not NYC.
* There’s a lot of “it just doesn’t feel right to me” floating around whenever someone points out, statistically, that NYC is both far safer than its recent history and far safer than the rest of the country. And it’s perfectly reasonable that people would feel that way, because it is unintuitive! But unintuitive feelings don’t trump numbers, and there’s no real evidence (including from sources that have a strong incentive to make crime seem as bad as possible) that massive amounts of violent and property crime are going unreported.
Yes there is not evidence because the gangs and those living under their thumb do not reveal the evidence to police. As I said, no one is inviting Professor Squiggles or woodruffw the computer hacker on the next hit. I'll be the first to admit it's not provable, I've said that all along. It probably never will be provable, and despite your claims that NYPD is happy to report crime I can assure you NYPD is still scared shitless of getting in a gunfight with organized crime except in the narrowest of circumstances where they have controlled conditions and a planned out mission to ambush their enemy alone. NYPD has as much incentive to let sleeping dogs lie as much as the gangs do. They have zero incentive to make it look like their cops need to be doing something that is likely to get them hurt -- much easier to cite some yuppie dunce for a DUI or something -- and aside, "going home safe to your family comes first."
Living in the city is one of those places where the statistics sound nice but not going off your intuition eventually catches up to you.
But we're not talking about investigative evidence; we're talking about dead human bodies. I don't need to do a gang ridealong to confirm or refute the crime statistics, unless you think that the NYPD is massively undercounting the number of suspected homicides in the city (and again, in a way that's disproportionate with homicides in the rest of the country).
(The stuff about firefights similarly confuses this -- I have no doubt that the NYPD is afraid of getting into gunfights. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the routine paperwork of recording a homicide victim.)
Intuition is meant to comport with ground reality, and the ground reality is that NYC is not gangland anymore (and hasn't been for decades). Other cities might still be, but we aren't.
I'm willing to consider what you say is true (earlier you said violent crime, so I'm going to revert back to that here rather than just homicide which is harder to hide). Also willing to consider it is not.
Ultimately recorded crime data should be used as an aid to guide our decisions, in combination with other signals. I would consider your view reckless in light of deciding how to go about my life in the city, but ultimately it is your decision to make and I hope it guides you well.
4 homicides already this year and it's not even August? I read on HN that between 1990 and 2003 there had been just 10 homicides in the very same subway and it allegedly had been much more dangerous in that period of time [1]. Seeing that the population only grew by ~15% since 1990 it looks like a huge increase in murder rate. What's going on there?
Subway crime rates have risen substantially in the last two years; it remains to be seen whether that’ll become a long-term trend. In particular, as ridership numbers return to normal, the rate seems to be going down.
Even with the 2022 rise, the subway remains substantially safer than any other form of transit.
So, to be safer than 0.07 death per billion miles in air travel and still have at least 4 death (there might be more deaths from other causes) and assuming nobody will die the rest of the year, also given 3M daily commuters from your numbers it appears the average commute in NYC subway is more than 52 miles?
This sounds like an extraordinary claim, what data are you using to get there?
Completely unpredictable and impossible-to-prevent car crashes do happen sometimes, but they are a very tiny minority. Most car crashes have a clear chain of events that led to them that could've been prevented.
I found it interesting that in some realestate videos for NYC apartments, there would be big black vans parked out the front by security and the realestate agent wasn’t permitted to film in the lobby.
Doors and locks might not be sufficient for security but full time employees guarding the building would.
My parents have left their car doors unlocked, their house wide open, keys on the dash, money in plain sight, for 40+ years. Not once, not even even once, has a theft occurred.
Violent crime however is a certain reality in NYC.
This is apples and oranges: the article is about death (and violent crimes), not theft.
That said, the numbers don't really lie: New York (the state, including the city) ranks lowest in burglaries per capita[1]. For larceny theft, the state is also towards the bottom[2]. Those are state numbers, of course, but almost half of the state lives in the city.
Because I was too lazy to pull CompStat[1]. But here you go:
* NYC recorded 6,486 burglaries in 2021, for a population of 8.38 million. That's 77.39 burglaries per 100,000 people, which makes the city's burglary rate lower than the rest of the state.
* The city recorded 18,862 grand larcenies in 2021, for the same population. That's 225.08 larcenies per 100,000 people, which is also lower than the rest of the state.
Both burglaries and larceny are up this year, significantly. But even if they double, NYC will still be well below national and state averages.
Edit: Correcting myself: the final statistics[2] for robbery in 2021 show 12811 robberies, for a final rate of 152.88. That's still a fraction of NY state's burglary rate, which is the lowest in the nation. For grand larceny it's 487.71, which is also still below both state and national averages (by two thirds).
Are you claiming that New Yorkers report crimes less frequently than others? It'd be great to have a source for that; absent that, there's no reason to believe that any sample error in the NYC crime data isn't similarly reflected in all crime data.
I'm relatively confident that residents of NYC, and similar big cities, report fewer of the crimes that actually happen than people elsewhere. But that's the sort of claim from my life-experience, including plenty of time as a child in the NY suburbs, and most of my adult life in San Francisco, that may not have handy official stats to back it up.
I suspect a survey of residents, asking questions like, "have you had anything stolen that you did not file a police report about?", would reveal relative urban versus suburban or rural propensity-to-report trends here better than official crime stats – but I don't know of such a data series.
It's good to feel confident about things. But data is even nicer.
I've never had to file a police report for theft in NYC (where I've lived for 20+ years), because I've never had anything stolen from me. Unless you count the kid who, in third grade, stole my Pokemon cartridge. But the response to that involved schoolyard justice.
Well if that's the argument then it seems we must take it on faith that NYC is more dangerous no matter what, seems a weird thing to start a religion on.
Because insurance requires reporting for coverage?
In small towns and cities all around the world, people don't report crimes for a variety of reasons. It's not clear why that would be more true in NYC than elsewhere.
When I first moved to NYC, it was a wet, slushy winter. My wife left her shoes outside our apartment door to dry off overnight, in a locked building with about 12 other units.
By 7am the next morning, they’d vanished. I had to go buy her replacement shoes.
We didn’t report the theft; why bother? The police couldn’t and wouldn’t do anything about it.
The next four years in NYC weren’t all that different; lots of petty theft and crime, all the time, everywhere. Unreported and unresolved.
These days, I live in the mountains outside of Boulder. Absolutely zero crime over the past 10 years. Our yearly murder rate up in the hills is zero, and has been zero for decades.
I've lived here my entire life, and I've never had my shoes stolen from outside my apartment, whether the building was locked or unlocked. I'm sorry that that happened to your wife, but it's a single instance.
You're welcome to doubt, but it's true. I've never even had a bicycle stolen (in the city that is; someone stole one from me in the suburbs of Maryland once).
Unless you're saying that people in New York disproportionately don't report crime that doesn't change much about the rankings. And also having lived very rural and very urban my intuition is that there is significantly more unreported law-breaking in the countryside (sometimes for the mundane reason that there barely is police in the first place).
People in New York disproportionately don't report crime, because there's so much, and so little chance of effective investigation/prosecution/recovery, they have better things to do. It's just a cost of the city's other benefits.
Indeed. But do those most responsible, such as local officials, really want to know, if a sort of learned-helplessness in residents has created an illusion of being safer than reality?
I realize you have the scientific high ground here but from a pragmatic viewpoint of anyone who's lived in both the country and the city, it almost sounds comical to hear someone say this.
Edit: And in no time someone chimes in about their safe life they currently live in Tokyo, Japan -- probably the safest large city in in the entire world and one if if not the safest country in the world. Hope y'all have your visas ready. Of course we know this is in bad faith, because the Japanese analogy would be to compare Tokyo to rural Japan not to small town America.
Except that it's not comical. I've lived in both, and I've experienced way more crime in my life in the country than in the city. In the country, we didn't report neighbor disputes because we didn't want them to murder us in our sleep, because we ratted them out to the police. We have a neighbor kill one of our dogs (by feeding it antifreeze), we had them threaten us with guns on our own property (which, obviously is why we were worried they'd kill us in our sleep). We had property stolen numerous times. There were always trespassers in our woods. There was a hit and run on the street in front of us (we did actually report that). We had constant problems with meth heads. This wasn't in some crazy backwoods filled with trailer parks. It was relatively affluent (for the country).
My brother lives in a small town, and kids in his neighborhood shot their kids with BB guns. They have issues with neighbors leaving their dogs off leash and attacking their dogs. They've had people from the neighborhood try to run them off the road. None of these things get reported to the police, because the police won't do anything, and you'll start a crazy feud with the neighbors. You don't hear about family feuds in the city, but they're a constant in small towns and can last generations.
I've lived in New Orleans, NYC, SF, and Tokyo, and other than New Orleans, I'd say every place has felt safer than when I lived in small towns or the country when I was growing up.
Sounds like a single day in the city. Rather than people just threatening with guns, they just actually pointed guns at my head and tried to rob me. At least in the country it was legal for me to carry and point back. If that's all you got from a lifetime in the country it sound like a joke to time spent in the city.
I've never been robbed in the city (I have in the suburbs). I've never been burglarized in the city (I have in a small town). I've never had a gun pointed at me in the city (I have in a small town).
Most cities, especially nowadays, are quite safe. I think small towns are generally also safe, but from my personal experience, I've found the country to be less safe than cities because you're effectively on your own.
Perhaps then safety depends on personality styles. I much prefer to be on my own, and don't mind arranging for my own defense. The thought of depending on police for that function terrifies me, particularly after Supreme Court rulings that effectively state they have no duty to protect you.
I think perhaps the city is safer for people who solve things by reporting problems to authority, whereas country is safer for those who rely on themselves. If you live in rural areas and depend on police for anything other than helping get the word out and possibly picking up someone after the fact, you are just fucked.
Here's an experiment you should try, since you claimed to never have anything stolen. Buy a bike, any bike, and one of those cable locks. Lock it on a public street and leave it for 8 hours during the day. Then see if it's still there at the end of the day.
I'm sorry, but what? Do you seriously believe that there's some kind of omnipotent bike theft ring in NYC, poaching bikes as soon as they're locked up?
I rode my bike to high school (in a "bad" neighborhood) regularly, and locked it outside with a regular cable lock. It was never stolen. When I got a job, I locked my bike up with the same cable lock for months, until I got access to the bike room. Never stolen.
Bike theft does happen here; I know people who have had bikes stolen. But it's not particularly common, even given the rise in expensive e-bikes.
You’re either woefully confused, blatantly lying, or have lived an incredibly and uniquely sheltered existence in some sort of enclave of wealth and privilege.
> Do you seriously believe that there's some kind of omnipotent bike theft ring in NYC, poaching bikes as soon as they're locked up?
Does Bloomingdale count as an “enclave of wealth and privilege”? It wasn’t considered the safest neighborhood when I was growing up, but it’s considered very safe now. I don’t know what to tell you: I went to public schools here, have rode my bike my whole life, have rode the subway independently my entire life, &c. &c.. The “worst” thing that’s happened to me is being bugged for money on the street.
I’m not blind to some advantages I have: I’m tall, have a large frame, and a deep voice. But I was also a little kid for the first 18 years I was here, and nothing bad ever happened to me.
Yes, I really do live here. And yes, there are bike theft rings. But they’re not omnipotent, and they’re fundamentally opportunistic; I’ve never had any issues with any bike I’ve owned being stolen, and neither has anybody else in my family.
If Bloomingdale is the same Bloomingdale Google Maps tells me is in the middle of Manhattan and 2 blocks from Central Park NYC, yes, it is an enclave of wealth and privilege. Try riding your bike around the Bronx some time, it'll broaden your world view.
> I went to public schools here
There's a world of difference between a public school in a wealthy area and one in a shitty one. The former might as well be a private school in terms of the quality of instruction and available funding from PTA donations.
This is a ridiculous sampling error. If as many people passed by your phone in your small midwestern town as do in my densely populated neighborhood, I suspect it would be stolen.
> People in New York disproportionately don't report crime,
How do you know it is disproportionately? I live in a suburb (not in NY) and I've never reported petty theft. What would be the point? Police isn't going to do anything about it.
> When I first moved to NYC, it was a wet, slushy winter. My wife left her shoes outside our apartment door to dry off overnight, in a locked building with about 12 other units.
I kinda feel sorry for your wife shoes, but personally I wouldn't even list that in theft: unless you live in Japan, yes, things left outside your house DO tend to vanish, especially if left overnight!
> The next four years in NYC weren’t all that different; lots of petty theft and crime, all the time, everywhere. Unreported and unresolved.
Can you please share more? Because our definitions of theft seem so different that I seriously wonder what you call crime.
Personally, I've always felt safe in NYC and NJ. Oh god I miss the good food from Palisades Park...
> These days, I live in the mountains outside of Boulder
I have visited Boulder and noticed quite a few things besides the obvious like how it's not welcoming to smokers (smoking is banned everywhere). Among the disturbing ones, the police force seems to enjoy harassing the homeless. I was told about that and didn't believe it until I witnessed it with my own eyes. That's far more concerning to me to have shoes stolen outside my home.
Also, people felt kinda fake? As in, lots of virtue signaling, but I felt uneasy in a very creepy way.
It's very hard to describe. It suffices to say there's no amount of money you could pay me to live in Boulder, while NYC stills feels like home even if I don't live there anymore.
Maybe my few days of visit was just a fluke, but it's rare I've felt so bad about a city to say something as harsh.
> things left outside your house DO tend to vanish, especially if left overnight
That's quite a sad thing you've grown used to. I've lived in suburbs in several states and not one would have me saying that things left outside my house tend to vanish.
You should expect more from your fellow citizens. Not stealing is a basic decency and sending thieves to jail should be a basic tenet of society.
> personally I wouldn't even list that in theft: unless you live in Japan, yes, things left outside your house DO tend to vanish, especially if left overnight!
This is exactly analogous to blaming someone for walking home at 3am through a badly lit area while visibly having money, or being attractive and dressed to show it.
I'd rather shave a year or two off my life than deal with a lifetime of getting my shit stolen... and living under the constant fear of violent assault, or the pain of watching females in my life living under the constant and real threat of sexual assault.
Living in fear is no way to live, and most people here express no particular fear of violent assault.
This warrants introspection on your part: if you're afraid but the people actually here aren't (including every woman I know), is it possible that your idea of the situation doesn't reflect its reality?
I am curious, on surface it is appealing to use per capita numbers including the central point in the original article, but, what do you think about 1) The density of people is vastly different between some small wrecked town in Missouri vs. NYC 2) Yes, fewer X/capita, but does that really matter when you witness, experience living in an overall dangerous (absolute, not per capita) place that the chance of a dangerous activity happening within 5 blocks of your current position in NYC is far more?
Shouldn't we also consider the density of people and exposure to crime? What good is it to live in a place where you're surrounded by crime in close proximity? Kowloon walled city [1] probably had less per capita crime as an extreme example of population density.
This is yet another one of those counterintuitive findings. Similar to the UK being poorer than the poorer state in the US. Rural areas tend to have a lot of homelessness , violence, addiction, and other problems and not enough police. The notion that blue states are secular and degenerate and red rural areas are exemplars of morality and salubrity are wrong. Both urban and rural areas have problems.
I split my time between a rural town and an urban center. I think the murder rate is higher per 100k in the smaller area but they don't really report or have the means to effectively confirm a murder, I've seen multiple people in the last decade die of extremely unusual circumstances that were ruled suicide or accident. A man with both hands taped together inside a sleeping bag that 'shot himself in the head' A man that was 'accidentally' hit in the back of the head with a metal baseball bat.
Over the last decade that I've been here, someone has died in an extremely suspicious way and there are never any reported homicides. Yet if you calculate those deaths out per 100k/year the rate is much higher than the urban area I spend time in. Yet everyone in the rural area is afraid of the dangerous city. In the end, my guess is that a lot of rural areas don't have the same quality of reporting or police presents that a city can afford.
I'm open to the idea NYC safer than its reputation; I appreciate NYC a lot, and live in another city, San Francisco, with a 'meaner' rep than I think true/fair.
But, there's a bunch of things that make me suspicious of the main graph/rankings:
(1) Leaving out suicide & drug ODs. These vary a lot by region, so whether a region creates motive & opportunity to throw your life away is a relevant 'safeness' indicator, for most people.
(2) Leaving out "accidental poisonings" & "falls". These may hide violence & other dangerous living conditions, especially in dense cities, or marginal communities, where many simply don't bother to report to authorities every assault - but do still have to seek medical care for an ‘accident’. People in "small town America" die of these things too, so why shouldn't a 'safeness' metric include them?
(3) The author uses a vague catchall exclusion category "sequelae of external causes of morbidity and mortality" that risks hiding relevant dangers, including even aftereffects of earlier violent-injuries, depending on coding standards of exact/immediate cause-of-death.
(4) For the widely-forwarded horizontal bar-graph titled "America’s Safest Metro Areas, but not all the analyses, the author uses the whole "New York-Newark, NY-NJ-PA" metro. The nearest part of PA to NYC seems to be Delaware Water Gap, 80 miles/1h40m away! So this winds up including a lot of 'small towns' & suburbs, not really "NYC" itself.
Altogether, when there's this many footnotes about a custom & perhaps idiosyncratic-to-the-author definition of "external causes", there's reason for pause before shouting a pleasingly-contrarian result from the rooftops.
Nope. Just moved from 15 years in Upper East Side. People that should be in an insane asylum are walking around everywhere. One of these guys was recently walking around daily attacking random people unprovoked. And this is in an expensive area of the city.
Go walk around 86th btwn Lex and 3rd at night and let me know what your study says then.
NYC is dangerous, filthy, and extremely expensive. Every day I’m thankful I’m out of there.
I lived in UES from 2016 - 2019 around 77th and 2nd. Anybody there during that time can remember the "Spitting Lady" who lived around the area and would literally spit on passer-bys, scream at the top of her lungs for hours on end and who also had a son with mental illness who would act as muscle for her/intimidate people who dared mess with her.
The point is NYC still has big city problems (one could argue the biggest, because it is the biggest), especially around homelessness and how to correctly provide care for them. That does not mean NYC is not safe.
I have never felt safer living in both Manhattan and Queens, as opposed to the Bay Area or living in Chicago.
Also this fascination with NYC and it's trash situation is such a tired and frankly disingenuous dig at the city. While it is expensive, no argue there, it is not dangerous or filthy. You'd think after having lived there for 15 years you'd have some pride in becoming a New Yorker (lord knows I do and weep for the fact I no longer live there) but maybe the city is better off without you.
I'm like 90% sure I was spit on by this woman during a week long business trip in 2018. I ignored it and kept walking. Figured she just didn't like the cut of my jib or something, but I guess it makes sense that it'd be a regular occurrence and I feel slightly less bad about it now.
I was in high school there during this time and every day was a new tale of who ran into her before school/during lunch. Many people would check with friends in earlier lunch periods to get the word on where she was for the day so that they could pick a place for lunch on a different street.
> Also this fascination with NYC and it's trash situation is such a tired and frankly disingenuous dig at the city. While it is expensive, no argue there, it is not dangerous or filthy. You'd think after having lived there for 15 years you'd have some pride in becoming a New Yorker (lord knows I do and weep for the fact I no longer live there) but maybe the city is better off without you.
So you just assert it's fine and continue with an ad hominem argument?
Allow me to retort: maybe it's a trash pit of a city because of apologists like you? NYC reeks in a way I've not encountered outside of the US.
There's no point in trying to convince people who already come into the discussion with such charged language as "filthy", "disgusting" or "trash pit". Their minds are already made up, sadly, and yes, the city doesn't deserve such disrespect and slander, especially from someone who claims to have lived there for 15 years. Shameful. The sanitation system in the city is near the bottom compared to other issues like the MTA; anybody making an argument to the contrary either has never lived in the city or is willfully ignorant.
> Also this fascination with NYC and it's trash situation is such a tired and frankly disingenuous dig at the city
If only trash was the only issue.
Walk around Chinatown on hot days and you can smell the fish juice the stores dump into the streets/sidewalks baking in the sun. Then yes, you have the huge piles of garbage bags on the streets everywhere.
But really what I was referring to was the infestation in many buildings of some combination of mice, rats, cockroaches, and bedbugs. This includes Manhattan and the outer boroughs and includes buildings where you're paying $3k/month to rent a tiny apartment.
The rat problem in UES is particularly bad. They're everywhere.
Of course there's the homeless pee all over midtown that you get to randomly get a nice whiff of as you're walking around. Or the upscale neighborhoods where everyone owns a little dog (so there are hundreds of them on the same small set of sidewalks) covered in pee every morning.
I'm actually amazed that anyone who's lived in the city would deny that it's filthy, it's so obvious to me that I didn't expect that to be controversial.
You are catastrophizing relatively small and isolated issues. In my time in NYC (7 years), I know of 1 person who got bedbugs. Never met anybody with a mice or rat problem. I've seen more rats in Chicago than I ever did in NYC. They primarily confine themselves to the subway, where in Chi they're running around the alleys.
Either you're in that relative minority or you are completely blowing the problem out of proportion.
It’s not my intention to be argumentative but we’ve somehow just had completely different experiences.
I’ve had many friends, and personally experienced, the problem with mice and cockroaches in buildings.
The rats tend to be outside but they’re not confined to the subway. They’re in the bushes in all the parks, in the trash areas in front of almost all buildings at least in UES, under outdoor dining decks, everywhere. I kicked one by accident while walking down the street one night.
It may also be a time period thing. When COVID began the rat problem was already bad but for some reason got much worse since.
The real problem is that NYC is much more dangerous, and much more unpleasant than NYC of ten or five years ago. And for no good reason other than bad policy choices.
100% agree. Before De Blasio I felt generally safe walking around Manhattan, except maybe Downtown at night because it was more desolate/commercial then.
I live in NY. Most people in NY will not agree with this article.
This is not because sensationalist media has successfully tricked them into thinking there is more crime than there is, but because they have directly experienced the rise in crime in their daily lives.
Crime is up across the entire country, especially in large urban metros. That being said NYC is still incredibly safe relative to its size. New Yorkers need some perspective. I'm writing from Chicago after having moved from NYC last year.
I am glad this was posted in Opinion on Bloomberg.
Drugs, cars, suicide, falls, and murder kill rural folks more than New Yorkers. Drugs and cars seem to be the outsized killers, based on the data provided.
I would like to see the data about where people died, not where they lived, as part of these measurements. It might not tell you where to live, but it would tell you where not to go.
NYC has a FUCKTON OF PEOPLE. And crime isn't uniformaly spread among it all. Some small sub-sections could be accounting for dispraportionately more than others. So with both of those things, the liklihood of a crime happening is very high. But not per 100k people.
That's the big difference. If there is 1 shooting per 100k people, and there are 5 million people around, that's 50 shootings. Vs if you have only 10,000 people around. At 10,000 people, you might see a shooting every 5 years, but proportionately that's double the NYC rate.
That's where the visibility vs reality is so counter-intuitive.
Also interestingly enough, I see A LOT of homeless (I work near a shelter). And they are indeed crazy looking. But honestly the worst they do is yell at you, and often its because they haven't had real human contact in months. Just imagine being isolated inside a massive crowd.
I just replace "something happened in nyc" with "something happened in Wyoming or Alaska or North Dakota or South Dakota or Montana or Maine or Nebraska" when looking at Fox News headlines about how this city is apparently imploding.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] threadBut we already knew that people worry about getting held up at gunpoint in the big city, but not so much about crashing their car on the way to the big night out (or even worse, on the way home).
I live in a small village and there is currently discussion going on about extending the legal amount of time a person can keep holiday decorations on their house. On one side are the folks that think Christmas lights are way too tacky in February or March and on the other side are the folks that say the weather could easily make it too dangerous to get them down within time limits (never mind how dumb and overbearing it is to have time limits in the first place). I lived in Chicago for 20 years and some people had holiday lights on their million dollar condo balconies year round - because it is never safe to take them down lol (kidding).
The need for some people to police *everything* is exhausting.
I feel similarly about Putin invading Ukraine. How do you get up in the morning so motivated and full of energy to order kids to go massacre other kids? I can barely muster the juice to write a few lines of code and hit the gym.
I've lived in/near NYC, Baltimore, Boston, and Philly. Baltimore's the only one where I've been mugged (at gunpoint no less), or really robbed at all. Also someone was murdered in the building across the street from my apartment, in a botched home invasion. And I lived in one of the "better" neighborhoods.
Baltimore has an amazing creative scene (music/art/film/etc) and great food, and I actually really enjoyed living there, but the safety issue is quite serious.
I don't think the problem is insurmountable though. I'm surprised whenever I visit Washington DC in recent years, because DC used to be even more dangerous than Baltimore, but you'd never know it today.
NYC is on the complete opposite side of the spectrum. 15 years here and I've never had a serious incident, and I'm struggling to even think of anything major affecting any of my friends too.
Anecdotally, I see much more petty disregard for traffic laws by cars (including large vans and trucks) than I did before COVID.
[1]: https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/last-year-was-deadlies...
That’s effectively zero.
[1]: https://www.timessquarenyc.org/do-business/market-research-d...
If you are involved in gang or other criminal behavior, you are a heightened risk of death, but it is still a pretty random occurrence. If not, you have a much lower risk, and it is still pretty random should it actually occur.
I think it is pretty fair to lump them in together.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32183007
Not complete control, but pretty good.
And I say this as someone that likes cities.
Source please
That said, if you ignore NY, Central counties of large metro lead the way in homocide and therefore would likely lead the way in non letal violence. The country and fringe suburbs are much safer on average from homicide by there on measure.
It is only when you add in other causes you see deaths in the country rise.
I think you can cut your chances of being killed in a road accident significantly by controlling your alcohol intake and using common sense. Something like 60% of pedestrian road deaths are intoxicated pedestrians.
Do you have a source for this? I looked up your claim and found this study from the NHTSA[0] (pg 23), which does say that 60% of pedestrians hit have a BAC over 0.08; the catch is, that number is specifically for crashes which occur between 12:00AM and 3:00AM.
From pg 26 - "Of the pedestrians involved [in fatal crashes across all hours], 33 percent were intoxicated, with a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.08 grams per deciliter (g/dl) or greater."
Since the NHSTA study I linked was conducted in 2001, it's possible that new information has been made available in recent years; if that is the case and that's where your data comes from, feel free to link.
[0] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/8094... - pg 23
For some reason your link isn't working, but I was using this report[1]
33% percent of pedestrians were intoxicated, which matches your number.
Another 16% of the pedestrians were on freeways or interstates.
There is no number, but I would guess using a smartphone when crossing streets and not using cross walks are also big risk factors.
I say this not to "blame the victim" but point out that if someone is concerned about being hit by a car, there are a number of simple steps that the pedestrian can take to drastically reduce their risk.
https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2020-02/GHSA-Pedest...
Like... take the subway in NYC [1]? Homicide victims in normal cities that don't have mentally deranged homeless roaming the streets usually did something that enhanced their risk. Homicide victims in NYC... had the unfortunate luck to be selected by mentally ill homeless that should have been institutionalized.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/man-wanted-pushing-woman-on...
So far, in 2022, there have been 4 homicides on the NYC subway. Considering that about 3 million people ride it each weekday (which, in turn, is far below the pre-COVID numbers), I'll take my chances versus our national car deaths statistics.
Yes, so it wouldn't have shown up in your touted homicide stats, yet the fact that it happened makes everyone who rides the subway feel less safe.
How many attempted homicides, attempted muggings, stalkings, etc. are there that never get reported?
> How many attempted homicides, attempted muggings, stalkings, etc. are there that never get reported?
Do you have a source indicating that NYC underreports these crimes uniquely, and not merely that they're generally underreported? Our police are generally zealous when it comes to violent crime statistics, since it allows them to pump the Fear Machine and keep public support up.
I'm sure most of their deaths end up getting found out sooner or later, if they're someone who will be missed. Anything lesser probably ain't gonna be found out if it's gang on gang. This is the kind of stuff that you can kind of 'feel in the air' but can't prove because no gang is going to let Professor Squiggles nerd up on his sociology study during the next hit.
* “Like NYC” is doing a lot of work here. NYC has organized crime, but not a lot of violent organized crime anymore. There’s a reason the handwringing over MS-13 focused on the suburbs of Long Island and not NYC.
* There’s a lot of “it just doesn’t feel right to me” floating around whenever someone points out, statistically, that NYC is both far safer than its recent history and far safer than the rest of the country. And it’s perfectly reasonable that people would feel that way, because it is unintuitive! But unintuitive feelings don’t trump numbers, and there’s no real evidence (including from sources that have a strong incentive to make crime seem as bad as possible) that massive amounts of violent and property crime are going unreported.
Living in the city is one of those places where the statistics sound nice but not going off your intuition eventually catches up to you.
(The stuff about firefights similarly confuses this -- I have no doubt that the NYPD is afraid of getting into gunfights. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the routine paperwork of recording a homicide victim.)
Intuition is meant to comport with ground reality, and the ground reality is that NYC is not gangland anymore (and hasn't been for decades). Other cities might still be, but we aren't.
Ultimately recorded crime data should be used as an aid to guide our decisions, in combination with other signals. I would consider your view reckless in light of deciding how to go about my life in the city, but ultimately it is your decision to make and I hope it guides you well.
1.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32223533
Even with the 2022 rise, the subway remains substantially safer than any other form of transit.
By miles traveled or by the total number of deaths occurred while traveling?
* Number of deaths, miles traveled
* Number of deaths, per capita commuter
* Number of deaths from violent crime or negligence, miles traveled
* Number of deaths from violent crime or negligence, per capita commuter
I would love to see how the numbers compare
This sounds like an extraordinary claim, what data are you using to get there?
Completely unpredictable and impossible-to-prevent car crashes do happen sometimes, but they are a very tiny minority. Most car crashes have a clear chain of events that led to them that could've been prevented.
Doors and locks might not be sufficient for security but full time employees guarding the building would.
My parents have left their car doors unlocked, their house wide open, keys on the dash, money in plain sight, for 40+ years. Not once, not even even once, has a theft occurred.
Violent crime however is a certain reality in NYC.
That said, the numbers don't really lie: New York (the state, including the city) ranks lowest in burglaries per capita[1]. For larceny theft, the state is also towards the bottom[2]. Those are state numbers, of course, but almost half of the state lives in the city.
[1]: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-most-burglaries-in-t...
[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/232583/larceny-theft-rat...
* NYC recorded 6,486 burglaries in 2021, for a population of 8.38 million. That's 77.39 burglaries per 100,000 people, which makes the city's burglary rate lower than the rest of the state.
* The city recorded 18,862 grand larcenies in 2021, for the same population. That's 225.08 larcenies per 100,000 people, which is also lower than the rest of the state.
Both burglaries and larceny are up this year, significantly. But even if they double, NYC will still be well below national and state averages.
Edit: Correcting myself: the final statistics[2] for robbery in 2021 show 12811 robberies, for a final rate of 152.88. That's still a fraction of NY state's burglary rate, which is the lowest in the nation. For grand larceny it's 487.71, which is also still below both state and national averages (by two thirds).
[1]: https://compstat.nypdonline.org
[2]: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_...
As a poster above you mentioned, why report a crime if you know nothing will be done.
I suspect a survey of residents, asking questions like, "have you had anything stolen that you did not file a police report about?", would reveal relative urban versus suburban or rural propensity-to-report trends here better than official crime stats – but I don't know of such a data series.
I've never had to file a police report for theft in NYC (where I've lived for 20+ years), because I've never had anything stolen from me. Unless you count the kid who, in third grade, stole my Pokemon cartridge. But the response to that involved schoolyard justice.
But "independent adult" also doesn't mean much. I was riding the subway alone by the time I was 7 or 8, and didn't have anything resembling a curfew.
If you were talking about petty theft, I'd agree with you, but for the most part, burglaries are nearly always reported.
In small towns and cities all around the world, people don't report crimes for a variety of reasons. It's not clear why that would be more true in NYC than elsewhere.
When I first moved to NYC, it was a wet, slushy winter. My wife left her shoes outside our apartment door to dry off overnight, in a locked building with about 12 other units.
By 7am the next morning, they’d vanished. I had to go buy her replacement shoes.
We didn’t report the theft; why bother? The police couldn’t and wouldn’t do anything about it.
The next four years in NYC weren’t all that different; lots of petty theft and crime, all the time, everywhere. Unreported and unresolved.
These days, I live in the mountains outside of Boulder. Absolutely zero crime over the past 10 years. Our yearly murder rate up in the hills is zero, and has been zero for decades.
I've lived here my entire life, and I've never had my shoes stolen from outside my apartment, whether the building was locked or unlocked. I'm sorry that that happened to your wife, but it's a single instance.
Unless you're saying that people in New York disproportionately don't report crime that doesn't change much about the rankings. And also having lived very rural and very urban my intuition is that there is significantly more unreported law-breaking in the countryside (sometimes for the mundane reason that there barely is police in the first place).
People in New York don’t report crime that disproportionately occurs in places like New York.
Edit: And in no time someone chimes in about their safe life they currently live in Tokyo, Japan -- probably the safest large city in in the entire world and one if if not the safest country in the world. Hope y'all have your visas ready. Of course we know this is in bad faith, because the Japanese analogy would be to compare Tokyo to rural Japan not to small town America.
My brother lives in a small town, and kids in his neighborhood shot their kids with BB guns. They have issues with neighbors leaving their dogs off leash and attacking their dogs. They've had people from the neighborhood try to run them off the road. None of these things get reported to the police, because the police won't do anything, and you'll start a crazy feud with the neighbors. You don't hear about family feuds in the city, but they're a constant in small towns and can last generations.
I've lived in New Orleans, NYC, SF, and Tokyo, and other than New Orleans, I'd say every place has felt safer than when I lived in small towns or the country when I was growing up.
Most cities, especially nowadays, are quite safe. I think small towns are generally also safe, but from my personal experience, I've found the country to be less safe than cities because you're effectively on your own.
I think perhaps the city is safer for people who solve things by reporting problems to authority, whereas country is safer for those who rely on themselves. If you live in rural areas and depend on police for anything other than helping get the word out and possibly picking up someone after the fact, you are just fucked.
I guarantee you it won't.
I rode my bike to high school (in a "bad" neighborhood) regularly, and locked it outside with a regular cable lock. It was never stolen. When I got a job, I locked my bike up with the same cable lock for months, until I got access to the bike room. Never stolen.
Bike theft does happen here; I know people who have had bikes stolen. But it's not particularly common, even given the rise in expensive e-bikes.
> Do you seriously believe that there's some kind of omnipotent bike theft ring in NYC, poaching bikes as soon as they're locked up?
Literally yes. Do you even actually live in NYC?
I’m not blind to some advantages I have: I’m tall, have a large frame, and a deep voice. But I was also a little kid for the first 18 years I was here, and nothing bad ever happened to me.
Yes, I really do live here. And yes, there are bike theft rings. But they’re not omnipotent, and they’re fundamentally opportunistic; I’ve never had any issues with any bike I’ve owned being stolen, and neither has anybody else in my family.
> I went to public schools here
There's a world of difference between a public school in a wealthy area and one in a shitty one. The former might as well be a private school in terms of the quality of instruction and available funding from PTA donations.
I'll do the same in my small midwestern town.
We can repeat this experiment until you run out of money.
That's why we use per capita statics.
My cell phone: will be returned by my neighbor.
I'll take the "bias" in the numbers all day lol
How do you know it is disproportionately? I live in a suburb (not in NY) and I've never reported petty theft. What would be the point? Police isn't going to do anything about it.
Really?
> When I first moved to NYC, it was a wet, slushy winter. My wife left her shoes outside our apartment door to dry off overnight, in a locked building with about 12 other units.
I kinda feel sorry for your wife shoes, but personally I wouldn't even list that in theft: unless you live in Japan, yes, things left outside your house DO tend to vanish, especially if left overnight!
> The next four years in NYC weren’t all that different; lots of petty theft and crime, all the time, everywhere. Unreported and unresolved.
Can you please share more? Because our definitions of theft seem so different that I seriously wonder what you call crime.
Personally, I've always felt safe in NYC and NJ. Oh god I miss the good food from Palisades Park...
> These days, I live in the mountains outside of Boulder
I have visited Boulder and noticed quite a few things besides the obvious like how it's not welcoming to smokers (smoking is banned everywhere). Among the disturbing ones, the police force seems to enjoy harassing the homeless. I was told about that and didn't believe it until I witnessed it with my own eyes. That's far more concerning to me to have shoes stolen outside my home.
Also, people felt kinda fake? As in, lots of virtue signaling, but I felt uneasy in a very creepy way.
It's very hard to describe. It suffices to say there's no amount of money you could pay me to live in Boulder, while NYC stills feels like home even if I don't live there anymore.
Maybe my few days of visit was just a fluke, but it's rare I've felt so bad about a city to say something as harsh.
That's quite a sad thing you've grown used to. I've lived in suburbs in several states and not one would have me saying that things left outside my house tend to vanish.
You should expect more from your fellow citizens. Not stealing is a basic decency and sending thieves to jail should be a basic tenet of society.
This is exactly analogous to blaming someone for walking home at 3am through a badly lit area while visibly having money, or being attractive and dressed to show it.
This warrants introspection on your part: if you're afraid but the people actually here aren't (including every woman I know), is it possible that your idea of the situation doesn't reflect its reality?
Then please define "violent crime", because from what I've seen below (some shoes stolen outside a home) isn't what I'd even list as theft.
Shouldn't we also consider the density of people and exposure to crime? What good is it to live in a place where you're surrounded by crime in close proximity? Kowloon walled city [1] probably had less per capita crime as an extreme example of population density.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City
Over the last decade that I've been here, someone has died in an extremely suspicious way and there are never any reported homicides. Yet if you calculate those deaths out per 100k/year the rate is much higher than the urban area I spend time in. Yet everyone in the rural area is afraid of the dangerous city. In the end, my guess is that a lot of rural areas don't have the same quality of reporting or police presents that a city can afford.
I'm open to the idea NYC safer than its reputation; I appreciate NYC a lot, and live in another city, San Francisco, with a 'meaner' rep than I think true/fair.
But, there's a bunch of things that make me suspicious of the main graph/rankings:
(1) Leaving out suicide & drug ODs. These vary a lot by region, so whether a region creates motive & opportunity to throw your life away is a relevant 'safeness' indicator, for most people.
(2) Leaving out "accidental poisonings" & "falls". These may hide violence & other dangerous living conditions, especially in dense cities, or marginal communities, where many simply don't bother to report to authorities every assault - but do still have to seek medical care for an ‘accident’. People in "small town America" die of these things too, so why shouldn't a 'safeness' metric include them?
(3) The author uses a vague catchall exclusion category "sequelae of external causes of morbidity and mortality" that risks hiding relevant dangers, including even aftereffects of earlier violent-injuries, depending on coding standards of exact/immediate cause-of-death.
(4) For the widely-forwarded horizontal bar-graph titled "America’s Safest Metro Areas, but not all the analyses, the author uses the whole "New York-Newark, NY-NJ-PA" metro. The nearest part of PA to NYC seems to be Delaware Water Gap, 80 miles/1h40m away! So this winds up including a lot of 'small towns' & suburbs, not really "NYC" itself.
Altogether, when there's this many footnotes about a custom & perhaps idiosyncratic-to-the-author definition of "external causes", there's reason for pause before shouting a pleasingly-contrarian result from the rooftops.
I asked the Bloomberg author for details of the ICD-10 codes used in his custom definitions – https://twitter.com/gojomo/status/1534624384102461440 – but he did not respond.
Go walk around 86th btwn Lex and 3rd at night and let me know what your study says then.
NYC is dangerous, filthy, and extremely expensive. Every day I’m thankful I’m out of there.
The point is NYC still has big city problems (one could argue the biggest, because it is the biggest), especially around homelessness and how to correctly provide care for them. That does not mean NYC is not safe.
I have never felt safer living in both Manhattan and Queens, as opposed to the Bay Area or living in Chicago.
Also this fascination with NYC and it's trash situation is such a tired and frankly disingenuous dig at the city. While it is expensive, no argue there, it is not dangerous or filthy. You'd think after having lived there for 15 years you'd have some pride in becoming a New Yorker (lord knows I do and weep for the fact I no longer live there) but maybe the city is better off without you.
So you just assert it's fine and continue with an ad hominem argument?
Allow me to retort: maybe it's a trash pit of a city because of apologists like you? NYC reeks in a way I've not encountered outside of the US.
If only trash was the only issue.
Walk around Chinatown on hot days and you can smell the fish juice the stores dump into the streets/sidewalks baking in the sun. Then yes, you have the huge piles of garbage bags on the streets everywhere.
But really what I was referring to was the infestation in many buildings of some combination of mice, rats, cockroaches, and bedbugs. This includes Manhattan and the outer boroughs and includes buildings where you're paying $3k/month to rent a tiny apartment.
The rat problem in UES is particularly bad. They're everywhere.
Of course there's the homeless pee all over midtown that you get to randomly get a nice whiff of as you're walking around. Or the upscale neighborhoods where everyone owns a little dog (so there are hundreds of them on the same small set of sidewalks) covered in pee every morning.
I'm actually amazed that anyone who's lived in the city would deny that it's filthy, it's so obvious to me that I didn't expect that to be controversial.
Either you're in that relative minority or you are completely blowing the problem out of proportion.
I’ve had many friends, and personally experienced, the problem with mice and cockroaches in buildings.
The rats tend to be outside but they’re not confined to the subway. They’re in the bushes in all the parks, in the trash areas in front of almost all buildings at least in UES, under outdoor dining decks, everywhere. I kicked one by accident while walking down the street one night.
It may also be a time period thing. When COVID began the rat problem was already bad but for some reason got much worse since.
This is not because sensationalist media has successfully tricked them into thinking there is more crime than there is, but because they have directly experienced the rise in crime in their daily lives.
. . . it's because they never leave the metro area or even consider conditions anywhere else.
That was my experience living there, anyway. A glaring blindness to anything not NY, where everything happens.
People will say all sorts of kooky things based on vibes.
No conflict of interest here.
Drugs, cars, suicide, falls, and murder kill rural folks more than New Yorkers. Drugs and cars seem to be the outsized killers, based on the data provided.
I would like to see the data about where people died, not where they lived, as part of these measurements. It might not tell you where to live, but it would tell you where not to go.
NYC has a FUCKTON OF PEOPLE. And crime isn't uniformaly spread among it all. Some small sub-sections could be accounting for dispraportionately more than others. So with both of those things, the liklihood of a crime happening is very high. But not per 100k people.
That's the big difference. If there is 1 shooting per 100k people, and there are 5 million people around, that's 50 shootings. Vs if you have only 10,000 people around. At 10,000 people, you might see a shooting every 5 years, but proportionately that's double the NYC rate.
That's where the visibility vs reality is so counter-intuitive.
Also interestingly enough, I see A LOT of homeless (I work near a shelter). And they are indeed crazy looking. But honestly the worst they do is yell at you, and often its because they haven't had real human contact in months. Just imagine being isolated inside a massive crowd.