Headpigeons!Follow

By square mile it STILL comes out that cities are safer than country areas. Now talk about population density. Say there's a 0.001% pa chance of being killed in the country, and a 0.0002% pa chance of being killed in the city. In a city of 4 million that's 800 killed per year, and in a city of 20 million that's 4000 killed per year. In a town of 5,000 there's 1 murder every 5 years, and a town of 10,000 there's one murder every year.

So you are walking down a city block at night... how likely are you to be one of the 4000 that year? Still only 0.0002% chance of being attacked and killed, because there's about 10,000 people within a one or two block radius who are running the same chances. And the people INSIDE their own homes are worse off than you are because 98% of rapes and murders are perpetrated by someone the victim is related to or knows personally. Nothing like family angst to make you lose your head and attack someone in the heat of the moment. You're not thinking about the law when it's personal.

Here's the general area where I live

You can live in many places shown on that image and have access to shopping, groceries, banking, restaurant, whatever with a 15 minute walk. You could live almost anywhere on there and have access to all of it with a 15 minute bike ride. And, in 95% of those cases, you wouldn't actually see any of those places unless you left your neighborhood and set out to find them. They have zero negative impact on me when I'm in my home.

Depending on what you do, you could also work close to home. Either retail/service or else in the various professional buildings (medical, real estate, insurance, legal services, etc).

I'd be ****** too if everything was upside down.

I see the best place in the world doesn't teach you how to link decently.

I will decide who reads what and the terms in which they will read it. Sorry, Ozzie in-joke about ex Prime Minister John Howard being particularly obnoxious about refugees.

Actually I think the other half of the Wiki article is interesting too. Ranked by personal safety: Luxembourg, Bern, Geneva, Helsinki and Zurich are the top five. Monocle ranks differently to Mercer, including more safety and ecology criteria, and comes up with a different list again.

Edited, Jan 13th 2012 11:26pm by Aripyanfar

Sure. But I go to the grocery store a lot more often than I walk miles deep into the woods.

I know, eh? Women these days can't seem to do anything without flashing a bit of ankle.

Scandalous.

I find that hard to believe. Do you have data to back this up? The difference in population density can often be extreme (100-1000 times more dense) between large cities and rural areas. For your claim to be true, you'd have to have a per-capita difference greater than the density difference. So not just "a few times more", but hundreds of times higher per-capita crime rates.

I'm willing to accept that it's possible, but I'd need something more than you just saying that it's so.




Not very. But remember we're talking about relative values that are all in the "very unlikely" range anyway. The point is that you are more likely than you might be walking (or as Tirith pointed out, driving) home late at night in a more rural area. And the density bit doesn't matter. Most of the population density in an urban setting is because housing is so tightly packed (or goes up more than out). The fact that there are 10,000 people tucked away in their beds in their homes within the square mile area you are walking through instead of 10 people doesn't make you safer in any way at all.

This kinda reminds me of the argument we had on this forum about travel safety, where I pointed out that while "deaths per passenger mile" may be a valid measurement from an accounting (or insurance) point of view, it's not from a "how likely am *I* to die while traveling from point A to point B)?". The idea that my odds of dying in a crash change based purely on the number of other passengers in the same vehicle with me is pretty absurd.

And the idea that your odds of being mugged change based on how many people live in the apartment buildings you're walking by is equally absurd. What matters is how many crimes of a given type occur in the area you are in, and how exposed you are (meaning how much are you standing out based on your behavior). If you're the one lone guy walking down a stretch of street when a gang decides to mug the next guy who walks by, all those other people not walking down the street but living nearby don't matter. And if you have a schedule which requires you to be more likely to be in that situation, the statistics of the "per mile" crimes outweighs the fact that so many people not in that situation are safe. You're the antelope on the outside of the herd, and the fact that you're crossing a river with more total crocodiles in it kinda matters more than the size of the herd.

Welp, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's annually released crime statistics showing a city of 110k people having more violent crimes than a city of 8m seems like pretty reliable source when one is claiming that bigger cities are statistically safer to live in than smaller ones. Interestingly, of the 400 cities listed (main criteria is 75k population minimum), San Diego is ranked the 221st most dangerous city, while New York is 269th. The ranking based on the number of murders, rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults, burglaries, and motor vehicle thefts.

Excuse me if I find the compiled data of people who track and release it annually over the word of someone who "finds it hard to believe," but I feel much better for my family's chances here than many smaller places, with the added benefit of living somewhere where quite literally everything is available to them.

I'd try to distance myself from comments about how small suburban cities are safer than big urban cities if someone else had the statistics to prove it wrong, too.

gbaji - spoken like a man that's never lived in the country.

1) A PER CAPITA DIFFERENCE PER SQUARE MILE IS A DENSITY DIFFERENCE.

2) If you have deaths per passenger mile worked out for plane travel then your odds don't change with the number of passengers travelling with you, but with the number of miles you fly per year. This statistic is in no way comparable to the flat murder or mugging rate per capita in a given district in a given time frame. If the murder or mugging rate in one district is 0.002% per year in one district, and 0.01% in a second district, then that's the dice you roll for living in each district, or leaving your house at any time in each district. It doesn't matter if the perception is that the second district is safer than the first. The stats are the reality. If the perception is wrong, then to be oxymoronic, the perception is wrong.

3) Given that 98% of violent crimes are committed by relatives or known persons, and are most likely to be committed in your home or a known location of yours, it's the people living in houses who are the gazelles in far and away the most peril, compared to the innocent gazelles on the street. In fact, if you think about the distribution of stats, gang members are each more likely to be the victim of more numbers of violent crimes than the sum total of the violent crimes (muggings) they deal out. This may be explanatory in the causal chain of them dealing out muggings. While being no excuse, of course.

This is where my background knowledge of American cities breaks down, in comparison to Australian cities. My background knowledge tells me that no Australian city has experienced the "doughnut" phenomenon that some American cities have experienced where the central city becomes "undesirable" while the outer ring of suburbs are seen as a haven. Australian cities have higher density in their centres, but higher crime rates, poverty rates, unemployment, vacancies, failed businesses or illiteracy rates do not correlate with higher density or centrality in the city geography. What tends to change between inner urban and outer suburbs is price of property, and price of rents, and therefore prices in goods and services. Inner Urban is more expensive.