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0 pointsiudqnolq3y ago0 comments

The idea that cities are more violent than less populated areas of the USA is a fascinating myth. One factor is that cities release their crimes stats earlier in the year. So newspapers write articles about those stats, and then when the rural stats come out later the topic of crime stats is exhausted. Another factor is that most reporters live in cities and reporters tend prioritize their surroundings.

One (imperfect) way to look at it is by looking at per capita homicides by county. Here's California: https://www.countyhealthrankings.org/app/california/2022/mea...

The counties with the highest murder rate in CA are Trinity, Kern, Lake, Del Norte, and San Joaquin. They're about twice as murderous as Alameda (Oakland).

A confounding factor is that smaller counties have a larger margin of error, but the overall trend is still clear. Another confounding factor is that this is by county and not city, but if cities were much worse than their surroundings they'd dominate the per capita metric.

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fiestaman3y ago· 1 in thread

Homicide rates by metro according to Bloomberg (2020) [1]

  - Central counties, large metropolitan areas: 10.3
  - Medium metros: 7.3
  - Small metros: 6.4
  - Nonmetro: 6.4
  - Fringe counties, large metros: 4.9

1. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-07/is-new...

iudqnolqOP3y ago

Interesting! But I took a closer look at the source behind those statistics and it's consistent with the California data I posted.

It turns out there are seven states with very dangerous metro areas (Missouri, Illinois, Maryland, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana) and eight states with dangerous metro areas (South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Indiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Nevada). The remaining states are much safer, with metro rates comparable to the nationwide nonmetro average.

Some of that matches with the conventional wisdom (e.g. Chicago is dangerous), but I think those nationwide statistics are quite deceptive. I think it's quite interesting that a California metro area is safer than a California nonmetro area, and both are nearly twice as safe as a Louisiana metro.

Take a look at these charts I generated: https://ibb.co/album/LztM7j . You can reproduce them with this saved CDC WONDER request: https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/saved/D140/D307F000

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