Gallup is out with a new survey showing which cities people rate as safe or unsafe to live in or visit. Most of the focus in their article is on the partisan gap between Democrats and Republicans, with Republicans rating most cities much more poorly, except for Miami and Dallas.
But a more interesting finding from the survey is that for either party, the safety ratings are almost entirely unrelated to city homicide rates1.
Breaking out the safety ratings by party doesn’t change much. People’s perceptions of which cities are safe simply do not line up with the cities’ murder rates, regardless of political party. The cities considered least safe on the list include Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. While Detroit has a high murder rate, Chicago is near the middle of the pack, just above Miami, which is rated as the fourth safest city on the list. Los Angeles and New York are near the bottom of the list in murder rate.
That these latter three cities are the most populous in the country might not be a concidence. If perceptions of crime are affected by consumption of crime-related news media, then it might follow that cities that recieve more news coverage—due to their size—would be percieved as more dangerous.
Note: I’m doing something usually frowned upon by people who publish crime stats: comparing crime rates across cities. There are various ways these comparisons can go awry, related to how data are reported for cities with many law enforcement agencies (the data here only include the largest agency).
Homicide rates are a useful proxy for violent crime since they are less susceptible to bias related to reporting rates.
I'm peripatetic (in Borneo at the moment) but I'm from New York and spend significant time there every few years.
It's astonishing how many of my friends around the US think that New York is terrifying hell maze.
Part of it is due to political BS, part of it to pre-Giuliani dangers, part of it to all of the TV shows and movies, and much of it to the fact that New Yorkers (like everyone else) talk aboug their problems... bit when New Yorkers talk, the world hears.
Well, not "the world". The world assumes that New York is safer than where they live which, unless they live in Latin America or Africa, isn't the case. But citizens of these United States guzzle up all the information from the 4 sources mentioned and inaccurately infer that it's dangerous when, in fact, it is delightful.
Thanks for the bar chart amigo.