Austin has 2.57 murders and nonnegligent manslaughters per 100K. Same year, SF has 6.35 per 100K. So SF is twice as bad as Austin. Your right about Miami though.
But 6.35 isn't bad. The murder rate in St Louis (for comparision to the US city with the worst) is 66.07 per 100K. And Colima Mexico (worst in the world maybe) is 182 murders per 100K.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_rat...
I know they’re in the linked table, just wanted to mention that even the best city in the US is still relatively bad.
Your parent didn't mention the "best city in the US" though? Per the linked table it seems to be Irvine CA at 0.72 per 100k, which would be below average in the UK or France.
By comparison, there were 93 murders in 2022 in the West Midlands (the UK region encompassing Birmingham, UK). That's a rate of 1.56 per 100,000 population, which I agree is pretty bad - but it's almost 50x less than the equivalent for the US city.
(source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/288221/number-of-homicid...)
Of course you are now more likely to die from lack of medical care than a murder, so it may not matter too much.
That said moving to the west coast people freak out all the time about yearly murder rates that are a weekend in STL.
To your point, Ulaanbaatar felt like one of the more dangerous cities I've been in because people would rob foreigners in broad daylight on crowded streets, but I don't think there was much homicide at all.
I once saw a crime map of the boroughs in a city where I lived. It showed the downtown as way higher than others per-capita, but it's because few live there as it's mostly commercial, more than higher absolute numbers. Lots of effects like this skew the numbers.
This NYT article has some numbers comparing "metro areas" rather than cities, and it knocks Saint Louis down a few slots (while still leaving it amongst the worst in the nation, for sure): https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/upshot/crime-statistics-s...
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SWE/sweden/murder-homi...
According to this[1], Sweden had 116 murders in 2022, less than the peak in 2020, which was 124. Basic maths tells me that' around 1.104 murders per 100K people (current population is 10.5 million).
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/533917/sweden-number-of-...
Puts thing into perspective.
https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-crime-rate-bob-lee-sf-vio...
2021 numbers put Austin slightly ahead of SF.
The list of counties with the highest rates of violence listed on that article are all southern and rural and not known to be associated with gang activity that I am aware of.
