Check the crime stats. You might be surprised. Exceptions exist, but... they're exceptions. My 5x-Manahattan's-violent-crime-rate former home county pretty well fit that description, and many locals believed it was quite safe. The stats tell another story.
Oh I know there's crime here in my city, but it doesn't reach my neighborhood.
Also the thing is the vast majority of the crime here is targeted. It's violence between gangs/drug dealers. It will never have anything to do with me.
But in NY and Chicago (especially Chicago) I know lots of average, unaffiliated people who have been robbed at gunpoint. Also large amounts of crime in NY goes unreported because people mind their business and/or don't trust the cops. They literally have had a "if you see something, say something" campaign for most of my life for this reason.
I've literally seen people step over people who were bleeding out from stab wounds in the NYC subway. I witnessed multiple violent crimes while living in NYC.
> Also large amounts of crime in NY goes unreported because people mind their business and/or don't trust the cops.
Yes, crime stats are a mess for a bunch of reasons. The most-reliable are murder stats, because they rarely go unreported or otherwise unnoticed, and are the hardest to "juke the stats" on, especially if you try to do it for more than a brief span of time. Those are better in scary ol' Manhattan than in much of "safe" small town, small city, and suburban America, and often way better.
Not really. Proximity is important. It influences how many people are going to be affected by it.
Getting murdered on my front lawn is a lot different than getting murdered in the lobby of a housing complex with 1000 people living in it.
Density is even more important when considering random crime because you have even more people who will be potential victims when someone is targeting an area.
> Density is even more important when considering random crime because you have even more people who will be potential victims when someone is targeting an area.
This is true—it's why rural towns and small cities are often really dangerous, while the overall state they're in might not have high violent crime stats, if a large proportion of the state's population isn't in towns or cities at all. Living far away from people is an effective way to avoid crime.
