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.
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 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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
And I say this as someone that likes cities.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
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