I think the biggest issue is that every measurement is ultimately a proxy for the two things I'd guess most people care about:
1) What is the actual objective likelihood of me being victimized if I live there (or visit there, or whatever action is under consideration)?
2) How safe and comfortable will I subjectively feel living there and walking around the neighborhood?
(1) is a very difficult question to answer. A lot of violent crime is personal in nature. Just because an area has a lot of crime doesn't necessarily mean you'd get swept up in it. You probably care more about muggings and such, which are a particular thing, clearly correlated with local crime rates but not actually the main driver of the stats you can see.
(2) is best assessed by just going there and seeing what the vibes are like. If a place is full of homeless people and has lots of catcalling on the street, it's not going to feel safe no matter what the technical crime stats are.
I'd also speculate that for most people, (2) is more important than (1). People primarily want to *feel* safe. Actually *being* safe is good too of course. But truthfully your personal likelihood of being killed or injured is low everywhere. Your risk of being robbed is higher, but is also not actually that big a deal. The material side of this is solved by insurance. But being robbed even once can really shake a person and change how they feel in that space. Safety is IMO best understood not as an objective reality of crime probability but as a subjective sense of comfort. People want to live somewhere where they feel like they can let their guard down and relax. But I'm not sure you can measure that by aggregating crime statistics.
> Safety is IMO best understood not as an objective reality of crime probability but as a subjective sense of comfort.
This is one way to understand why the media focuses so much on "mass shootings" which are a vanishing minority of gun crime, let alone gun deaths. It's also why people care way more about visible homelessness than they do about ghettoized turf war crime, even if the latter is responsible for much higher numbers.
John-- a man of your sophistication should just look at the american community survey data and regress away. however, if you are deciding between leafy burbs, crime really isn’t an issue. if you want to reduce your odds of being murdered, be nice to your wife and don’t take any lovers. that will have a far greater effect on your personal risk of homicide than whether your community’s rate is 1.2 or 1.6 per 100,000 per year.
Should people be using a list at all? People may want to know how safe their city is, but are they really comparing cities this why or do their thoughts about safety come from personal experience and general vibes instead of data?
I studiously avoid these lists because I’ve understood for years that they’re mostly SEO bait. When they’re not just plain useless, they can even be actively misleading.
There’s no substitute for actually going to a place and collecting vibes.
And just so there’s no misunderstanding... I moved across country in 2018, and faced the exact same information problem you were trying to solve - I had zero context for picking one town over any other. But on my interview trip, I did some light exploring and was able to pretty quickly identify an affordable town within 15 minutes of what became my job.
Staring at some SEO bait list online, I would probably have ended up overpaying for a boring and unwalkable place in any of the highly-exclusive towns around here that are just barely gentrified enough to preserve their historical districts without terrifying the rich NIMBYs. I’m glad I didn’t do that.
Yep, I'll take walkable and diverse over "safe" any day, although I'll also admit to a preference for "attractive" which means high enough property values here and there to ensure street trees and nice gardens.
As for "safety" in cities, I've found that well-established personal security practices can go a long way. When it comes to travel, people are willing to do the research, but urban neophytes seem to be a lot more interested in blaming the Mayor than in just taking their own precautions. On Nextdoor, you're not allowed "blame the victim" by offering the obvious advice ("My laptop [in clear view on the front seat] with my [unbacked-up] doctoral thesis was stolen from my car" or "A creepy guy followed me home [after I decided to walk home alone at 2 am after drinking all night."]
That said, the frequency of car break-ins is a legitimate criteria if someone has to park on the street.
What's the point of "walkable" if there are some times you can't walk? Being able to walk home instead of driving after a night out drinking is kind of the point, isn't it?
My point here is generally that young women should never expect to be safe at all times and places. Whenever I point these "facts of life" out in some online groups, I get reviled as denying basic rights to women. That just makes me wonder whether there are people out there who think their "rights" will somehow automatically ensure their physical safety.
Well...sure...but even in a city that's very safe & walkable overall, there are usually certain places where it isn't wise to walk. You usually become quite quickly familiar with what streets get a little worrisome in the wee hours, once you live in a place for a little while. You learn, for example, to route your walk close to things like university campuses, hospitals, and along well-lit main streets, and to avoid walking by the empty lot where some folks live in pipes. Not that the pipe people have, you know, done anything to anyone, to my knowledge, it's just spooky.
Sounds like you might have done just as well to flip a coin. Maybe if there was a place to look at local logs of reported crimes/incidents it would have been more informative.
Homicide and vehicle theft are the most consistently reported crime categories. Just compare those stats for a few of the most recent periods with recently reported data for the relevant locations.
Exactly this. Jeff goes on about how incomplete and bad the lists are. Ultimately, people have to have something tangible to hold onto when they're deciding to relocate, even if it's incomplete. People should instead use "Vibes", seriously? That's not going to tell me anything about the school system and very little about homicide rates. I'd hate to move to a bad area on the basis of the Good Vibes I had vacationing there one weekend.
Glad to see Mr. Jeff accurately note that St. Louis’s “most dangerous” reputation is a statistical myth, not truth.
Also, if anyone wants to know how dangerous we truly are, just TRY my patience here and argue that the myth is anything but bullshit. I promise that I will literally fight you.
I liked to stay downtown, either at the Hampton Inn or the Hyatt Regency near the Arch, but a couple times I stayed near Forest Park which was a cool area. I work for Henkel, and we have a plant in the North Riverfront area. When I stayed downtown I would hit up live music nights at BB's Jazz, Blues, and Soups, and I'm sure I missed the proper spots for ribs, but I did Sugarfire, Salt + Smoke, and a few others I can't recall.
It's been awhile since my time in STL, but personal opinion is that Pappy's is vastly over-rated. Personal favorite was Roper's Ribs, not exactly downtown though.
You forgot the (highly polarizing, but the haters are wrong) pizza! Oh, and the Italian food more generally; a random Italian place is usually much better in STL than in other US cities.
Sooo, when my Blues went to the Stanley Cup in 2019, I went down to the Blues fan bar in NYC, which of course was packed.
I get there an hour early, stand in line a while, get my beer, and I’m just standing there talking to other transplants when all of a sudden it hits me like a wave. “Holy fuck... that smells like... HOME.”
Sure enough, the owner of the bar had ordered a crap ton of frozen Imo’s pizzas and was selling them for a hefty profit. Everyone was ordering one and sharing their leftovers, just so happy to be reminded of our childhood delicacy that it turned into one big communal pizza-fest.
Man, it was so satisfying to watch our boys hoist Lord Stanley’s Cup on the home ice of that hated hellhole, Boston.
Careful what you say there, David! Boston is an awesome city!
Yes, I know Bostonians have a, um, reputation, but Boston has awesome museums, swan boats, beautiful public gardens and parks, clam chowder, very good (by American standards) public transit, and walking tours with witty guides in historical costumes! What's not to love?
(I lived in Boston for nine years, but I promise I wasn't one of the a-hole ones 😊)
does not justify your leap to "statistical myth". It is probably not quite as bad as people think, but it's still quite a high murder rate. I don't want to fight you though..
If you want to go broader than STL city limits... the state of Missouri has the second highest murder rate in the nation.
Fair enough. I will point out though that your link doesn't seem to have any population cutoff, so many of the top-50 are quite small populations. There are outliers in small-population MSAs. Have you seen data for MSA above some population cutoff?
What good is happening in Alabama that makes it lower than California and most of the Midwest?!? What bad is happening to the line of states from Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri?
Why is Pennsylvania a third of Ohio, and for all the Michigan fans out there, why is it higher than Ohio?
Also surprised that Idaho is lower than Washington or Oregon.
Normally I'm fine with reading this in a Twitter thread format, but this might be a case where it would be also nice to see it in just regular text somewhere--perhaps here some time!
“…a nationally published columnist and not just some rando on twitter”
Who, according to Wikipedia,
“…was suspended without pay from the LA Times for sockpuppeting on his blog "The Golden State". Hiltzik admitted to posting under false names on multiple sites, using the pseudonym "Mikekoshi" to criticize commentators Hugh Hewitt and Patrick Frey…”
And,
“… he encouraged public humiliation of unvaccinated people who died from COVID-19.”
Twitter doesn't work for me since I deactivated, so I assume this is about Hanania? I love Matt, but I always thought he was too jovial with an obvious racist (yes, it was obvious pre-doxxing). You can "know your enemy" without politely going back and forth with them like they're an esteemed colleague and not a wannabe George Wallace. Steve Sailer uses plenty of big words too and I suppose he's been correct about something once in his life, right? But Matt knows the guy is a kooky white supremacist so he ignores him.
The tweet just loaded while I was typing this, and no, I don't think Matt is "best friends" with Hanania. I just don't think creeps like him should be treated with respect and good faith on Twitter. It's okay to avoid bad people!
Just for the record, Matt didn't always ignore Steve Sailer. He's referenced in Matt's early books, and I expect the next one to fall will be Razib Khan, once the wider community realizes what he was up to earlier in his career.
I think the situation is somewhat overwrought. If I saw an article written by someone and commented on it, I would hope that doesn't mean that I have read everything they have ever written, much less agreed with it.
That being said, I was disappointed that he turned to this as a defense:
"My view (one of my most woke opinions!) is that racism is deeply entwined with conservative politics in the United States of America so if you want to talk to conservatives about anything you're going to be dealing with some people who have problematic views."
Does he not see how someone to his left would say the same thing about him and use his links to Hanania as evidence thereof?!?
Well, sure, but I think his point nonetheless is that people holding views you consider problematic doesn't mean you should write those people off as "lost causes", because we still have to live in the same country.
And...by the way...if Matt would like to talk to a conservative who almost certainly isn't a racist...maybe Matt could consider talking to.....................Tim Scott!
I thought that was a very interesting point he raised. Have to think about that a bit. I do wonder whether Matt is willing to do the same thing with antisemites, who appear to have some representation in the US, and not only on the right.
Feel like there should be a way to get this into secret congress. Attach a string to funding of something to require states track all deaths and provide cause of death. Once you get that database rolling, you can expand to cover other crimes.
So this piece provides many reasons these articles suck - but surely a real humdinger is amalgamating all types of crime? I’d be much more concerned living somewhere with 100 murders than 1 murder and 200 property crimes.
Everything depends. Maybe as far as their own convenience goes some people would rather live an a place with lots of murders (among gang members in a tiny section of the city) but no shoplifting, car break-ins where *they* live.
I actually suspect this is a big part of perceptions of crime; am I seeing disorder in places middle and upper class people tend to live in, work or visit. This comes up a lot with homelessness. Are people noticing more crime around them or have they noticed more tent cities in downtown areas post covid?
I also suspect this is (at least part) of why SF and NYC get reputations as high crime areas. The biggest driver is just excess media coverage, especially in the latter case. However, the other factor is certainly that both cities have large portions of their respective cities where middle and upper class people live, shop, work and just hang out in; including the trains. I’ll repeat again, go to downtown Houston after 8 PM and see just how few people are out and about.
None of this story can be told without talking about car-centric development. Between 1930-1970 a lot of central business districts were transformed from vibrant hubs into wastelands where no sane person ought venture at night, due to ground floor retail being replaced with featureless walls, the speed of nearby auto traffic on massively enlarged boulevards, and the vast spaces devoted to parking lots.
Agree with all of this - vibes ≠ crime. As I've complained many times here recently, I am put off by the vibe of NYC (public drug use and urination, aggressive panhandling, etc). But I don't actually feel unsafe there, because there are always a lot of people around/"eyes on the street."
In contrast, when I worked in downtown DC and walked the mile or so home from the Metro to my then-house in posh Chevy Chase,* I felt much more unsafe when it was dark, because nobody was outside. Once I was followed aggressively by a guy who kept asking me what time it was. I hightailed it for a CVS and took the bus the rest of the way.
*which was broken into multiple times, including while we were sleeping, despite an alarm system. Not to say that this is/was a high-crime area, but the sedate vibe was to some extent misleading.
Yeah, I moved from Highland Park in LA to Ithaca, NY and while especially pre-gentrification HP was objectively much more dangerous in terms of crime statistics, I feel way worse walking around in Ithaca because there are no streetlights or sidewalks in a lot of the areas near me.
It makes more sense to pay close attention to murder because they tend to be better accounted for. It's hard not to notice a dead body or a missing person. Property crime like graffiti may never be reported in bad areas.
I'm vaguely curious how many Slow Borers have ever entered a police report. I have done so exactly once (knock on wood).
Someone broke into my car about fifteen years ago. I was on a run in peak summer in Utah and, among other things, they stole my gatorade--a crime worse than murder.
Once when I lived in a gang neighborhood in LA, all of the cars in our apartment parking garage were broken into overnight. It was like 25 cars or something. One lady had her gas tank stolen, which is a thing I didn’t know could happen. The cops said it was an “inside job” likely planned by someone in our complex who knew peoples schedules. The cop advised my wife and I to move when we asked what precautions we could take. We did.
One time when I was at my in laws house a pregnant woman started banging on the door screaming saying her boyfriend was trying to kill her. We then heard gun fire and I opened the door and told everyone to go to the back of the house while I called 911. The boyfriend sped away in his black sedan. The cops arrived and I filed a report about that had happened. They found shell casings in the street but no bullets hit the house or anyone, thank god.
One time I was sitting on the side of the street in downtown LA when a black Escalade hit my car as it drove onto the sidewalk and took off my back bumper then swerved back onto the road and took off my front bumper. Then someone gave me the middle finger out of the window. Didn’t know the people and have no idea I’d they were ever caught. I also spilled the contents of my Del Taco burrito all over my car and it smelled like burrito for weeks. I drove without a front or back bumper for a month until I could afford to get it fixed. I got pulled over several times and impounded on the final time.
One time I was staying at a friends house while they were out of town and I accidentally set off the alarm and couldn’t remember the code. It was a nice neighborhood and I looked like a scruffy 23 year old stoner who didn’t belong. Cops arrived, guns raised and ordered me on the ground. They detained me while they called my friend who didn’t answer for awhile but finally picked up right as they were about to put me in the squad car.
I moved into the City of Detroit in the late 90s. Within six months our garage had been broken into and in a separate incident one of our cars sitting in the driveway had the air bag stolen. In both cases I filled out a police report so i could file an insurance claim.
The crimes themselves, along with the absolute indifference and inaction about them by the police, were a large part of the reason that we moved out of the city and into the suburbs just over a year after first moving in.
Working at the US attorney's office a year or so later I did get to play a very small role in prosecuting the ring leaders of the air bag theft organization.
Some grabbed the iPad out of my hand while I was getting off the bus in Los Angeles and I chased him yelling “stop thief”, and a police officer completed the chase and got it back. I think a report was entered, and I recall the cop saying “don’t worry it’s probably his third strike and he’ll be away for life” or something, which didn’t actually make me feel better.
I'm a bit surprised that grabbing an iPad is a felony and the cop was probably being more flippant than factual, but I just want to point out that that's likely the tip of the iceberg as as that person goes. Who knows how many people he's hurt or lives he's derailed. A guy who will rip an iPad out of a stranger's is pretty likely to financially support the drug trade, to break into houses, destroy property while trying to rip out copper wires or catalytic converters. 3 strikes is a lot! If you living in free society actually matters/mattered to that criminal, all he has to do is not try to destroy said society!
Whether a theft is a felony or misdemeanor has a lot to do with the value of what's stolen. A $1000 ipad is probably going to cross the threshold for felony in most jurisdictions.
What was described was larceny using force, i.e., robbery. Robbery is always a felony - the degree of seriousness depends not on the value of the property but on the level of force or threat used or available.
Forgive me for derailing this to a completely unimportant direction but: how do you determine the valuation for an item with dynamic price hovering on the threshold ?? First in terms of time (these things can lose value fast): is it the price purchased or At the time the crime was committed or by the time of the trial or what? Secondly is it some “market rate”
Or the retail listing ? Does it matter if the victim bought it used or at significant discount ?
I'm rusty on these things, so someone with better information can give a better answer. But it's basically the fair market value at the time of the theft.
How is that determined? Through evidence, which could include expert witnesses familiar with the market or some sort of sales data such as records of eBay sales of the same item at that time.
It is a question of fact for the "trier of fact" such as a jury or if there is no jury, the judge to decide. So both sides, the prosecution and defense, could present their evidence and then the trier decides. Much of the time it would not be a contested issue and the value is stipulated to.
It mostly doesn't matter what the victim paid, if anything, they could have received it as a gift and therefore paid nothing. On the other hand, if they paid $X that morning in an arm's length transaction that is at least evidence, not necessarily conclusive, that X is the market value.
You know I’m relatively on the law and order side on these threads but Getting someone a life sentence for committing petty crime three times is a gross miscarriage of Justice. Life sentences should be reserved for killers.
Forceful robbery seems like more than a petty crime. I'll give it to you that Ken's description is a pretty light-touch use of force, and quite possibly DA's wouldn't charge it that way for just the reason you're saying. But still...maybe don't go out of your way to commit a felony if you've already been convicted of two previous one?
And it may be punished by prison! But even robbery at gun point shouldn’t merit a lifetime sentence ! The punishment should fit it’s crime! A pattern of criminal behavior is good consideration to give the felon a punishment towards the legal maximum but never beyond that!
Sure, life is probably too long even for a patter. But the pattern is probably more important than the particulars of the specific crime, simply because it's the single most predictive element.
The 3 strikes law aims to address that predictiveness: 3 time felons seldom reform, and statistically speaking, multiple felons are responsible for a hugely disproportionate share of all crime, bc/ the crimes they've been convicted of are usually the tip of the iceberg. Whether that's unjust has an element of subjectivity.
Someone grabbing an ipad is probably primarily just trying to support a drug addiction. It would be more cost efficient both in financial and human costs to find a different solution than lock him up for life.
I recognize treating drug addiction is complex, but if we could do a better job of that we could reduce a lot of low level crimes and improve our stock of human capital at a much lower cost than long time imprisonment.
I think we could make some real headway in crime if we could figure out a way to make opioid addiction as cheap as alcohol addiction. Nobody snatches ipads to buy rotgut vodka.
No one really knows how to find another solution, and most drug addicts don't resort to strong-arm robbery and violent crime. I'm all for it if you know a good way.
From what I understand, the price of heroin and meth has plummeted 50-90% over just the past 5 years. Meth used to be cooked up in American labs, but now much more efficient, cheaper labor and larger Mexican labs produce it and ship it north. Heroin's way cheaper because fentanyl is basically a multiplier on heroin potency.
So I think we are much closer to them being as cheap as alcohol, if not actually there already.
Quite a few, actually. When I lived in a SFH in DC (described above, sold in 2016), my house was broken into multiple times and my detached garage a couple of times (bike/tools stolen). I was assaulted by a mentally ill woman who tried to pull me out of the driver's seat of my car. My wallet was stolen from the (locked) locker of my posh gym. I was involved in our Neighborhood Watch, and reporting such crimes was encouraged (didn't do me any good in terms of apprehension or getting my stuff back).
In NYC I was technically assaulted by a large man who shoved me hard in a park, but there were no cops around (thank goodness a kind dude distracted the mentally ill man so I could get away).
I’ve had two altercations with mentally I’ll or drug addicted homeless people. One happened when I was volunteering and feeding the homeless dinner on the street. One dude came up to another and slapped the styrofoam container out of his hand and they started getting into it so me and another dude interceded to break it up. No police report was filed then.
The second time was when I was outside of a salad place and this homeless guy was yelling at customers (saying horrible racist and homophobic things to everyone who went in). I asked him to “cool it” and he gave me a shove and called me a faggot. At that point the strip mall security guard came over and the homeless guy bolted.
I feel very fortunate that 1) those were the only two scraps I’ve been in with those unhinged people and 2) those incidents didn’t escalate.
One of the reasons I rarely go to some of my favorite museums and parks anymore with my daughter is fear of getting into an altercation with one of these people. You have no idea where something will go when someone is so far mentally untethered.
I feel similarly lucky. But these experiences have certainly affected my perception of my surroundings. I'm a 5'2" woman, in good shape for my (old!) age but it would be very easy for a normal- or large-sized person (as both of the people described above were) to hurt me if minded to do so.
I'm so sorry that some of your favorite places are now off-limits to visit with your daughter. As an urbanist and city planner, this is exactly what I worry about when people dismiss antisocial behavior in public spaces as a serious problem. I understand that these are complex and difficult problems, but the situation you describe is terrible for you and your family (and those institutions, and the city) and does nothing to help the mentally ill people on the streets.
I'm sorry Lindamc, my wife won't go by herself lots of places in LA proper now because of being a smallish woman and feeling unsafe. She's had a couple of scary incidents but luckily has been able to get away without issue even if she was harassed verbally.
These things have really made me much less sympathetic to the so called "homeless advocates" and the liberal disposition in LA around this issue.
I'm considering going to LA this fall with my young kid and I'm worried enough about mentally ill people that I'm sort of planning the trip around where I think they might be. Do you have any advice or popular places that should be avoided? How is Los Feliz / Griffith Park area nowadays?
Oh man, my best friend had a beautiful place right off of Los Feliz by the main road to Griffith Park but had to move because of this one homeless (sometimes naked guy) that would run around his neighborhood and one time threw a brick at his window (luckily it bounced off and the dude ran away). The cops just let the guy run wild for months.
During the day you'll mostly be okay other than random meth and fentanyl addicts pan handling a little aggressively or talking to themselves but the evening and early morning hours can be pretty bleak. Some days are worse than others and you may have a perfectly lovely experience if you are only there for a few days.
Griffith Park itself is actually still pretty nice and clean. I haven't had any issues going to the observatory or the hiking trails there. Los Feliz/SIlverlake/Echo Park are all pretty grimy these days.
Wow and thanks - sorry to pepper you with one more question but is it noticeably worse than it was in 2017, which is when I left? There were definitely some sketchballs bad then, too, mostly on certain streets, but you could run into them almost anywhere.
I have two friends I keep in touch with who still live in the general area, and one is prone to exaggerate in the negative direction and the other is prone to claim I'm being somehow "fooled by right-wingers" for even asking if crime has gotten worse there.
It has gotten worse, no question. Now, it isn't like mad max and the thunder dome or anything. You can still have a relatively normal day and relatively normal weeks. It's really just the frequency of negative interactions or feelings of less public order that are creeping in more often. I think right wingers exaggerate but I also know left wingers who make constant apologies and say things like "well it's better than living in those RaCiSt SuBuRbS".
in NYC it was enough hassle that I'd probably not do it again unless I needed the insurance paperwork or something really serious had happened. But for basic stolen stuff, there's just no point.
Just once for me: someone stole my rear license plate, which wasn't something that was even on my radar as a potential crime. Realistically the Baltimore police weren't going to pull me over for driving without a plate anyway, but I wanted to have some sort of proof to show while I waited on a replacement just in case.
The only other time I've been a victim of a crime I didn't report it. A friend from out of town was staying with us and forgot to lock the door when he got back late. A homeless guy was trying all the doors and tried to steal my friend's backpack. My friend caught him and shooed the guy out of the house, then woke me up to ask if we should call the police. I asked him whether the guy was still there, he said no and I said doesn't sound like the police can do anything then.
When my friend tells this story a lot of people say "you should've had a gun!" Which seems to me like a crazy reaction. The situation was resolved without escalating into violence, whereas if a gun had been pulled it'd have been guaranteed escalation.
Same thing happened to me. They actually replaced it with another plate and fortunately I noticed it the same day and reported it. I would have hated to have been pulled over after someone committed armed robbery with my license plate.
I did one when someone broke in to my car about 15 years ago and stole $200 I had received as Christmas present the night before at a family event (I had accidently left the money in the car).
Still very suspicious the only time in my entire life my car was broken into was the night I received the cash - literally have never had more than $20 in the car before or since and never been broken into (that night it was pillaged).
Someone broke into my car and stole my laptop when I was in Beverley Hills. I obviously didn't have any real hope of it being recovered but I had to file a police report so my insurance would cover it.
While I realize most crimes are more about opportunity than maximizing value, I'm still a bit shocked that my Ford Fiesta got targeted in that location. Surely you're going to find something better than my old laptop if you do your smash and grab on the Lambo or whatever in the same parking lot?
I've called in a few people passed out unsheltered in the winter. Oh, and I called in one time when I saw a woman with a baby asking random people where she could get "a hit." Not really reports though.
The most police interaction I've had came from being on a city bus that hit an older woman. Had several phone calls from different police people asking me to detail what I saw & heard (and another later from a private investigator representing the victim). So I guess that kind of incident gets investigated quite thoroughly.
I have had my house broken into twice and called the police both times. They asked me a bunch of questions and took notes. Is that filing a police report? There was follow up in both cases. The second time involved dusting for fingerprints and showing both me and my daughter a photo line up. They came so close to arresting someone for the crime each time, but as far as I know never got there.
I mean, without knowing about the longitudinal trend in your neighborhood the old people aren't self-evidently wrong here. Leaving your car doors unlocked and *not* having rotten teens ransack them for valuables at 4:42 AM is also a thing people do in various places.
Many years ago I moved from Atlanta to Boston with all my possessions in a Honda Accord. The night before I left on this drive, someone stole my car stereo. I’m normally against any kind of corporal punishment, but I may have fantasized about some things during that long drive.
No police report, though. Once filed a police report in New Orleans (lived Uptown, near Tulane) after a guy broke into my apartment while my girlfriend was asleep (I was already at work). Guy started robbing the place, realized she was there, thankfully took off.
This is only tangential to the piece but it reminds me how the academic discourse around crime is about rates, while most people think safety is measured in absolute number of crimes (just like how academics consider "good schools" to be schools that lead to the most student growth, while normies consider good schools to be the ones with the highest average student scores)
Lots of good debate on the value of crime rates even within academia!
The post alludes to this, but even within cities, there’s good reason to be suspicious about how well crime rates represent what’s happening in neighbourhoods. The clearest example is how downtown areas often have the “worst” crime rates, but that also tends to be because downtowns/commercial areas have relatively low populations (eg people who actually live in the area) but very high levels of through-traffic, so the ‘crimes per person’ stat gets wildly distorted, which leads to some (imo) poor policy choices. There’ve been some interesting efforts to use other denominators (eg crimes per the number of cell phones), so it’ll be interesting to see how those rates change!
I’ve often thought, for this reason, that it would be helpful to get some useful estimates of “actual population” of various places (cities and neighborhoods) based on how many people are physically present at various times of day, rather than the simpler official measure which counts the number of people that officially reside there (regardless of whether some are out of town for work or vacation at any point, while others are in town for work or tourism).
I guess I was limiting my thinking to cities within the US. Like, people generally think New York is more dangerous than Louisville or Birmingham, for example.
Reminds me of Twitter right-wingers trying to cope with NYC being objectively pretty safe by arguing that “crimes per square mile” should be the salient statistic
"Crime per square mile" seems like it has some degree of intuitive appeal, to be fair.
Crime in general and violent crime specifically (with the obvious exception of domestic violence) seems more likely to occur at street level than indoors, and the amount of street square footage in NYC is constant whereas buildings can increase population without increasing footprint. This means that both total crimes and (arguably more important to people, and probably the right stat to focus on for salience, broadly defined) the visible perception of crime and disorder are functions of area more than of population. The base of 125th St train station in NYC is incredibly sketchy as an area to be in, not as a function of likelihood of victimization per 1,000 people (even if the latter data is also very useful to have and relevant to know!).
Extending the NYC-centric metaphor, two guys getting into a fight on a subway car (or engaging in "showtime") ruins the ride whether there are 10 people or 200 people in the car - at a certain level crime-per-place rather than crime-per persons really is an appropriate locus of salience, certainly as applied to the feeling of comfort or discomfort in particular environs. Adding more people *can* potentially dilute the subjective effect of disorder but my priors are that this occurs at a pretty unfavorable rate - AIUI Times Square of all places used to be a hotbed of sleaze and criminality before Giuliani undertook to remake it, and I have a hard time believe that it wasn't well-trafficked.
I think people can reasonably be concerned about both - ultimately all wellbeing is subjective, after all,. "Being in a bad neighborhood" and the distaste people have for it is in one sense arguably a matter of perceiving the latter, but it's both intrinsically uncomfortable in and of itself and objectively concerning as increasing the likelihood of the former.
I don’t think people really distinguish between seeing crime and perceiving a significant personal risk. If a house on my block experiences a home invasion, it will make me feel less save regardless of the number of houses on my block. If I witness a robbery, I won’t take any solace in the density of the neighborhood. Rationally, these things should matter. But humans are not entirely rational.
Off topic completely, but I think I need to say this to you and don't know a better way to do this. It's ok to say "my bad" regarding your willingness to engage Richard Hanania. I absolutely do think there are some bad faith commentators out there who are saying or insinuating that you support or gave positive feedback to Richard's most odious views even before the latest revelations came out.
Having said that, I've cringed at commentators (including yourself) giving voice or engaging with this guy even before the latest revelations. I honestly did not know who this guy was until the Russia invasion of Ukraine and then suddenly he popped up in my Twitter mentions as someone saying Russia is going to easily conquer Ukraine. So far, not so terrible; a whole lot of people on all sides of the political spectrum thought Russia would win easily. But once he popped in my Twitter feed, I started wondering who this guy was. And immediately it became clear that his worldview was coming from a pretty troubling place. For example, it seemed really clear to me that he thinks we failed in Afghanistan because we were somehow too committed to advancing girls' rights and somehow too committed to feminism or something. I say this to be kind of critical of you and say it wasn't that hard to discern even from this published writings that he had some problematic views.
But I'll say these are things I concluded or was able to discern from reading his writings. It was not necessarily explicitly said verbatim as I wrote it. So there is sort of a "plausible deniability" aspect to what he wrote if that makes sense. So I do understand to a certain degree where you are coming from. You are committed to the idea that you need to engage with people who have policy positions and beliefs opposed to your own. Sometimes those people have what appear to be troubling world views, but it's not a 100% clear how troubling so in the meantime maybe it's worth listening to what they have to say when their more troubling worldviews aren't front a center a part of their arguments or when it is seemingly not relevant to a topic being discussed.
But then new revelations like the latest ones come out and make clear that a) his troubling worldviews are much much more troubling than we first thought and they were fairly troubling in the first place b) it's clearly a much more front of center part of their general worldview on a variety of topics.
Which is why I think my conclusion is it's ok to give a mea culpa. I do think you were a little too willing to listen to someone who's views were probably not worth platforming or engaging with. But again, it comes from a general place I can get behind which is willingness to engage with different viewpoints. But now that you "how deep the rot is" so to speak, you can say I was little too willing to engage with this person and shouldn't have been as credulous and willing to do so.
Hanania had already published deeply racist material before being "doxxed." Like...I don't know why respectable liberals pundits allowed him to be part of their circle to begin with. The guy advocated for mass incarceration of black men without cause just a few months ago! Following well-spoken racists doesn't make you heterodox, it makes you an asshole.
I suppose it's okay because he praises Asians' IQ to drive a wedge between them and black people? Gotta own the DEI woke libs, right?
Also worth noting that a lot of the things that are interesting about Hanania’s work are also signals that you probably shouldn’t be friends with him. He’s the conservative writer who’s probably most clear-eyed and honest about the personal characteristics of the typical American conservative, the real motives behind a lot of conservative attitudes about social issues (including his own), and the legal/institutional implications of what a real policy “war on wokeness” would entail.
But anybody who can see and understand all of those things and still align with the contemporary American conservative movement is showing you that… they’re just kind of a bad person.
I had always thought the main issue with “safest city” and “most dangerous city” lists was that they left out the biggest factor in safety and danger by focusing only on crime. I want to know my chance of being killed, and I don’t really care whether I am killed by crime or by car crash. Interesting to know that these lists are really bad even just on crime!
Really confused by the crime reporting statistics. Do 25% of people whose car is stolen not call police? And I’m really surprised that domestic violence reporting is so high - I had always read victims may be reluctant/unable to report but it’s reported just as much as things like trespassing.
This. It’s almost circular-you have already escalated to a point where you are near reporting to the police before it becomes a crime. As a practical matter, it’s probably almost all businesses who are inclined to follow through once giving the appropriate notice.
Unless you have insurance that will make good your loss, low level property and vandalism are likely not seen as worth your time in reporting, especially in a larger city where they're really not going to be able to do much about catching the perpetrator of getting your stuff back.
Uninsured undocumented immigrants who are victims of car thefts, etc. One thing most often missed in these discussions is the demographics of victims often skew heavily toward vulnerable populations who are less likely to report to the police.
Coincidentally, I just saw a story about a woman who had just moved to my town and had all her earthly possessions in her car. It was stolen, and she didn’t report it!! Or she didn’t until after asking for advice on a Facebook group. It was stunning.
Okay fine no list. But you're underplaying how important good crime stats are to people living in an area or looking to move to one.
How many people decided to avoid a neighborhood because they saw a liquor store they didn't like, or a group of people from a race they didn't like? People will absolutely resort to racial and other biases in the absence of better data.
I get that it's a very difficult data collection exercise, but is NeighborhoodScout worse than "I saw an abandoned gas station and that scares me"? I'm not so sure!
Maybe Democrats should do an everything bagel crime bill consisting of inter alia, a) a national Police Academy b) big money in NAS for crime, policing, prosecution, prison, social science research, c) money for police departments to report crimes according to a uniform methodology d) subsidies for technology like position trackers for people on parole/conditional release (useful for people awaiting hearing for asylum and irregular entry cases, too), surveillance and traffic control cameras, DNA database of everyone passing through the justice systems e) more prosecutors, court personnel, and police officers including para-police officers that handle administrative and most traffic and public order events.
I don't think that bill would qualify as an "everything bagel," because all those things are pretty closely related to crime and enforcement. The EB version would include a bunch of green policies, arcane rules about procurement (e.g., small and minority-owned business requirements, overwrought bidding processes), maybe some childcare stuff, etc.
Separately, if such a bill led to better (increased) reporting, you can just imagine the dumb attack ads: "...and Senator So-and-So championed the TK Crime Act, which led to a 30% increase in violent crime nationwide."
I am always skeptical of Top # Cities In America lists because everyone has different values on how to judge the best cities, and from my experience, the top two criteria that I most see actual people cite are family (which is individualized for every person) and weather (preference of which is about as subjective as it gets).
Not used to seeing the comment section this empty (which is also called never being awake at 3:30 I suppose)
Anyway, while I understand why it happens, it's frustrating that there are a ton of these click-baity lists doing things with data that are this clearly not intended. My standards for these sites aren't very high, but somehow they still manage to fall short
The utility of comparing cities of 25,000 with ones having hundreds of thousands or millions of residents seems limited. Indeed, the whole concept of ranking places using one-year data, especially given the wide variation with respect to reporting statistics, is sick. Every one of us has a stake in reducing crime everywhere.
In the absence of data about an important subject, people will use whatever is available. So, yeah, there are issues with these rankings.
Jeff Asher, what list should people use to determine how safe their city is?
I think the biggest issue is that every measurement is ultimately a proxy for the two things I'd guess most people care about:
1) What is the actual objective likelihood of me being victimized if I live there (or visit there, or whatever action is under consideration)?
2) How safe and comfortable will I subjectively feel living there and walking around the neighborhood?
(1) is a very difficult question to answer. A lot of violent crime is personal in nature. Just because an area has a lot of crime doesn't necessarily mean you'd get swept up in it. You probably care more about muggings and such, which are a particular thing, clearly correlated with local crime rates but not actually the main driver of the stats you can see.
(2) is best assessed by just going there and seeing what the vibes are like. If a place is full of homeless people and has lots of catcalling on the street, it's not going to feel safe no matter what the technical crime stats are.
I'd also speculate that for most people, (2) is more important than (1). People primarily want to *feel* safe. Actually *being* safe is good too of course. But truthfully your personal likelihood of being killed or injured is low everywhere. Your risk of being robbed is higher, but is also not actually that big a deal. The material side of this is solved by insurance. But being robbed even once can really shake a person and change how they feel in that space. Safety is IMO best understood not as an objective reality of crime probability but as a subjective sense of comfort. People want to live somewhere where they feel like they can let their guard down and relax. But I'm not sure you can measure that by aggregating crime statistics.
> Safety is IMO best understood not as an objective reality of crime probability but as a subjective sense of comfort.
This is one way to understand why the media focuses so much on "mass shootings" which are a vanishing minority of gun crime, let alone gun deaths. It's also why people care way more about visible homelessness than they do about ghettoized turf war crime, even if the latter is responsible for much higher numbers.
John-- a man of your sophistication should just look at the american community survey data and regress away. however, if you are deciding between leafy burbs, crime really isn’t an issue. if you want to reduce your odds of being murdered, be nice to your wife and don’t take any lovers. that will have a far greater effect on your personal risk of homicide than whether your community’s rate is 1.2 or 1.6 per 100,000 per year.
Should people be using a list at all? People may want to know how safe their city is, but are they really comparing cities this why or do their thoughts about safety come from personal experience and general vibes instead of data?
I used lists like these when moving between locations, particularly when a metro area has many options for choosing which near-suburb to live in.
I studiously avoid these lists because I’ve understood for years that they’re mostly SEO bait. When they’re not just plain useless, they can even be actively misleading.
There’s no substitute for actually going to a place and collecting vibes.
And just so there’s no misunderstanding... I moved across country in 2018, and faced the exact same information problem you were trying to solve - I had zero context for picking one town over any other. But on my interview trip, I did some light exploring and was able to pretty quickly identify an affordable town within 15 minutes of what became my job.
Staring at some SEO bait list online, I would probably have ended up overpaying for a boring and unwalkable place in any of the highly-exclusive towns around here that are just barely gentrified enough to preserve their historical districts without terrifying the rich NIMBYs. I’m glad I didn’t do that.
Yep, I'll take walkable and diverse over "safe" any day, although I'll also admit to a preference for "attractive" which means high enough property values here and there to ensure street trees and nice gardens.
As for "safety" in cities, I've found that well-established personal security practices can go a long way. When it comes to travel, people are willing to do the research, but urban neophytes seem to be a lot more interested in blaming the Mayor than in just taking their own precautions. On Nextdoor, you're not allowed "blame the victim" by offering the obvious advice ("My laptop [in clear view on the front seat] with my [unbacked-up] doctoral thesis was stolen from my car" or "A creepy guy followed me home [after I decided to walk home alone at 2 am after drinking all night."]
That said, the frequency of car break-ins is a legitimate criteria if someone has to park on the street.
What's the point of "walkable" if there are some times you can't walk? Being able to walk home instead of driving after a night out drinking is kind of the point, isn't it?
My point here is generally that young women should never expect to be safe at all times and places. Whenever I point these "facts of life" out in some online groups, I get reviled as denying basic rights to women. That just makes me wonder whether there are people out there who think their "rights" will somehow automatically ensure their physical safety.
Well...sure...but even in a city that's very safe & walkable overall, there are usually certain places where it isn't wise to walk. You usually become quite quickly familiar with what streets get a little worrisome in the wee hours, once you live in a place for a little while. You learn, for example, to route your walk close to things like university campuses, hospitals, and along well-lit main streets, and to avoid walking by the empty lot where some folks live in pipes. Not that the pipe people have, you know, done anything to anyone, to my knowledge, it's just spooky.
My approach to moving to a new city is always to rent for a bit until I get the feel for the area enough to buy.
Sounds like you might have done just as well to flip a coin. Maybe if there was a place to look at local logs of reported crimes/incidents it would have been more informative.
Were the lists your only criteria? If not, you were probably using them to supplement your vibes info as Andrew suggested is common.
Heavens no.
House prices in terms of $/sq ft is helpful. As is google maps and street view. Dirty and disorderly streets are a pretty good indicator of crime.
Homicide and vehicle theft are the most consistently reported crime categories. Just compare those stats for a few of the most recent periods with recently reported data for the relevant locations.
Exactly this. Jeff goes on about how incomplete and bad the lists are. Ultimately, people have to have something tangible to hold onto when they're deciding to relocate, even if it's incomplete. People should instead use "Vibes", seriously? That's not going to tell me anything about the school system and very little about homicide rates. I'd hate to move to a bad area on the basis of the Good Vibes I had vacationing there one weekend.
> The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.
- John Tukey (famous statistician):
Glad to see Mr. Jeff accurately note that St. Louis’s “most dangerous” reputation is a statistical myth, not truth.
Also, if anyone wants to know how dangerous we truly are, just TRY my patience here and argue that the myth is anything but bullshit. I promise that I will literally fight you.
And run up the assault statistics? :)
I’m in CT, so it can only *help* The Lou. 😜
Worked in St. Louis a bunch, love the arch, fried ravioli, ribs, and blues. Solid town.
Toasted, not fried.
Oof, out of town status confirmed
What area did you stay in?
I liked to stay downtown, either at the Hampton Inn or the Hyatt Regency near the Arch, but a couple times I stayed near Forest Park which was a cool area. I work for Henkel, and we have a plant in the North Riverfront area. When I stayed downtown I would hit up live music nights at BB's Jazz, Blues, and Soups, and I'm sure I missed the proper spots for ribs, but I did Sugarfire, Salt + Smoke, and a few others I can't recall.
Ahh yeah you can’t go wrong with those! Did you ever make it to Pappy’s?
It's been awhile since my time in STL, but personal opinion is that Pappy's is vastly over-rated. Personal favorite was Roper's Ribs, not exactly downtown though.
Barely anything in STL is downtown, unfortunately.
You forgot the (highly polarizing, but the haters are wrong) pizza! Oh, and the Italian food more generally; a random Italian place is usually much better in STL than in other US cities.
Sooo, when my Blues went to the Stanley Cup in 2019, I went down to the Blues fan bar in NYC, which of course was packed.
I get there an hour early, stand in line a while, get my beer, and I’m just standing there talking to other transplants when all of a sudden it hits me like a wave. “Holy fuck... that smells like... HOME.”
Sure enough, the owner of the bar had ordered a crap ton of frozen Imo’s pizzas and was selling them for a hefty profit. Everyone was ordering one and sharing their leftovers, just so happy to be reminded of our childhood delicacy that it turned into one big communal pizza-fest.
Man, it was so satisfying to watch our boys hoist Lord Stanley’s Cup on the home ice of that hated hellhole, Boston.
Careful what you say there, David! Boston is an awesome city!
Yes, I know Bostonians have a, um, reputation, but Boston has awesome museums, swan boats, beautiful public gardens and parks, clam chowder, very good (by American standards) public transit, and walking tours with witty guides in historical costumes! What's not to love?
(I lived in Boston for nine years, but I promise I wasn't one of the a-hole ones 😊)
All that is true, but then there's their sports fans/teams.
I’ve been there! It was good. Not exactly famous; just one of the hundreds of New American restaurants.
As a resident of CT I will die before ever committing the heresy of non-tristate pizza
You overstate.
"...that dubious distinction is due in part..."
does not justify your leap to "statistical myth". It is probably not quite as bad as people think, but it's still quite a high murder rate. I don't want to fight you though..
If you want to go broader than STL city limits... the state of Missouri has the second highest murder rate in the nation.
https://wisevoter.com/state-rankings/murder-rate-by-state/#:~:text=The%20states%20with%20the%20highest%20murder%20rates%20in%20the%20United,49.2%20murder%20per%20100%2C000%20people.
Not a myth, sorry.
The STL metro isn’t even in the top 50 by violent crime rate.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/433603/us-metropolitan-areas-with-the-highest-violent-crime-rate/
Missouri as a state is, yes, violent like any other red state. But THAT wasn’t what we were talking about.
Fair enough. I will point out though that your link doesn't seem to have any population cutoff, so many of the top-50 are quite small populations. There are outliers in small-population MSAs. Have you seen data for MSA above some population cutoff?
Yeah, and it’s only top-25, not top-5.
Congrats! =)
also you jumped from murders to violent crimes. I thought the thrust of the OP was that crimes are not consistently reported across jurisdictions.
It varies so much though!
What good is happening in Alabama that makes it lower than California and most of the Midwest?!? What bad is happening to the line of states from Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri?
Why is Pennsylvania a third of Ohio, and for all the Michigan fans out there, why is it higher than Ohio?
Also surprised that Idaho is lower than Washington or Oregon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Nations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch-Irish_Americans
I'm just saying.
To truly make the irony work, you need to threaten to drag the arguer back to St Louis and _then_ literally fight them.
Pour one out for our host today. He's fighting the good fight on Twitter against those who are using bad faith to attack him.
The thread where he clearly laid out his views:
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1688515051920019456
Normally I'm fine with reading this in a Twitter thread format, but this might be a case where it would be also nice to see it in just regular text somewhere--perhaps here some time!
It's sad and a little jarring that the guy calling Yglesias a "fucking idiot" is a nationally published columnist and not just some rando on twitter.
The profession that Matt has said has jarred him before is the behavior of college professors on Twitter.
“…a nationally published columnist and not just some rando on twitter”
Who, according to Wikipedia,
“…was suspended without pay from the LA Times for sockpuppeting on his blog "The Golden State". Hiltzik admitted to posting under false names on multiple sites, using the pseudonym "Mikekoshi" to criticize commentators Hugh Hewitt and Patrick Frey…”
And,
“… he encouraged public humiliation of unvaccinated people who died from COVID-19.”
A real prince.
Twitter doesn't work for me since I deactivated, so I assume this is about Hanania? I love Matt, but I always thought he was too jovial with an obvious racist (yes, it was obvious pre-doxxing). You can "know your enemy" without politely going back and forth with them like they're an esteemed colleague and not a wannabe George Wallace. Steve Sailer uses plenty of big words too and I suppose he's been correct about something once in his life, right? But Matt knows the guy is a kooky white supremacist so he ignores him.
The tweet just loaded while I was typing this, and no, I don't think Matt is "best friends" with Hanania. I just don't think creeps like him should be treated with respect and good faith on Twitter. It's okay to avoid bad people!
Just for the record, Matt didn't always ignore Steve Sailer. He's referenced in Matt's early books, and I expect the next one to fall will be Razib Khan, once the wider community realizes what he was up to earlier in his career.
I think the situation is somewhat overwrought. If I saw an article written by someone and commented on it, I would hope that doesn't mean that I have read everything they have ever written, much less agreed with it.
That being said, I was disappointed that he turned to this as a defense:
"My view (one of my most woke opinions!) is that racism is deeply entwined with conservative politics in the United States of America so if you want to talk to conservatives about anything you're going to be dealing with some people who have problematic views."
Does he not see how someone to his left would say the same thing about him and use his links to Hanania as evidence thereof?!?
Well, sure, but I think his point nonetheless is that people holding views you consider problematic doesn't mean you should write those people off as "lost causes", because we still have to live in the same country.
And...by the way...if Matt would like to talk to a conservative who almost certainly isn't a racist...maybe Matt could consider talking to.....................Tim Scott!
I thought that was a very interesting point he raised. Have to think about that a bit. I do wonder whether Matt is willing to do the same thing with antisemites, who appear to have some representation in the US, and not only on the right.
Some days I start to suspect that social media was really invented by the aliens in that Twilight Zone episode "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street".
On twitter, there are no good fights, only nonsense.
I thought his reply to Jeet Heer was a good one. Jeet is trying to pin something on Matt, but doesn't really have the goods and is reaching anyway.
It’s pretty embarrassing and sad that the US doesn’t publish better crime data even though there is clearly a lot of demand for it.
Feel like there should be a way to get this into secret congress. Attach a string to funding of something to require states track all deaths and provide cause of death. Once you get that database rolling, you can expand to cover other crimes.
So this piece provides many reasons these articles suck - but surely a real humdinger is amalgamating all types of crime? I’d be much more concerned living somewhere with 100 murders than 1 murder and 200 property crimes.
Everything depends. Maybe as far as their own convenience goes some people would rather live an a place with lots of murders (among gang members in a tiny section of the city) but no shoplifting, car break-ins where *they* live.
I actually suspect this is a big part of perceptions of crime; am I seeing disorder in places middle and upper class people tend to live in, work or visit. This comes up a lot with homelessness. Are people noticing more crime around them or have they noticed more tent cities in downtown areas post covid?
I also suspect this is (at least part) of why SF and NYC get reputations as high crime areas. The biggest driver is just excess media coverage, especially in the latter case. However, the other factor is certainly that both cities have large portions of their respective cities where middle and upper class people live, shop, work and just hang out in; including the trains. I’ll repeat again, go to downtown Houston after 8 PM and see just how few people are out and about.
None of this story can be told without talking about car-centric development. Between 1930-1970 a lot of central business districts were transformed from vibrant hubs into wastelands where no sane person ought venture at night, due to ground floor retail being replaced with featureless walls, the speed of nearby auto traffic on massively enlarged boulevards, and the vast spaces devoted to parking lots.
Agree with all of this - vibes ≠ crime. As I've complained many times here recently, I am put off by the vibe of NYC (public drug use and urination, aggressive panhandling, etc). But I don't actually feel unsafe there, because there are always a lot of people around/"eyes on the street."
In contrast, when I worked in downtown DC and walked the mile or so home from the Metro to my then-house in posh Chevy Chase,* I felt much more unsafe when it was dark, because nobody was outside. Once I was followed aggressively by a guy who kept asking me what time it was. I hightailed it for a CVS and took the bus the rest of the way.
*which was broken into multiple times, including while we were sleeping, despite an alarm system. Not to say that this is/was a high-crime area, but the sedate vibe was to some extent misleading.
Yeah, I moved from Highland Park in LA to Ithaca, NY and while especially pre-gentrification HP was objectively much more dangerous in terms of crime statistics, I feel way worse walking around in Ithaca because there are no streetlights or sidewalks in a lot of the areas near me.
It makes more sense to pay close attention to murder because they tend to be better accounted for. It's hard not to notice a dead body or a missing person. Property crime like graffiti may never be reported in bad areas.
I'm vaguely curious how many Slow Borers have ever entered a police report. I have done so exactly once (knock on wood).
Someone broke into my car about fifteen years ago. I was on a run in peak summer in Utah and, among other things, they stole my gatorade--a crime worse than murder.
I’ve done a couple.
Once when I lived in a gang neighborhood in LA, all of the cars in our apartment parking garage were broken into overnight. It was like 25 cars or something. One lady had her gas tank stolen, which is a thing I didn’t know could happen. The cops said it was an “inside job” likely planned by someone in our complex who knew peoples schedules. The cop advised my wife and I to move when we asked what precautions we could take. We did.
One time when I was at my in laws house a pregnant woman started banging on the door screaming saying her boyfriend was trying to kill her. We then heard gun fire and I opened the door and told everyone to go to the back of the house while I called 911. The boyfriend sped away in his black sedan. The cops arrived and I filed a report about that had happened. They found shell casings in the street but no bullets hit the house or anyone, thank god.
One time I was sitting on the side of the street in downtown LA when a black Escalade hit my car as it drove onto the sidewalk and took off my back bumper then swerved back onto the road and took off my front bumper. Then someone gave me the middle finger out of the window. Didn’t know the people and have no idea I’d they were ever caught. I also spilled the contents of my Del Taco burrito all over my car and it smelled like burrito for weeks. I drove without a front or back bumper for a month until I could afford to get it fixed. I got pulled over several times and impounded on the final time.
One time I was staying at a friends house while they were out of town and I accidentally set off the alarm and couldn’t remember the code. It was a nice neighborhood and I looked like a scruffy 23 year old stoner who didn’t belong. Cops arrived, guns raised and ordered me on the ground. They detained me while they called my friend who didn’t answer for awhile but finally picked up right as they were about to put me in the squad car.
Those are all my fun police report stories.
Crime really sucks.
I moved into the City of Detroit in the late 90s. Within six months our garage had been broken into and in a separate incident one of our cars sitting in the driveway had the air bag stolen. In both cases I filled out a police report so i could file an insurance claim.
The crimes themselves, along with the absolute indifference and inaction about them by the police, were a large part of the reason that we moved out of the city and into the suburbs just over a year after first moving in.
Working at the US attorney's office a year or so later I did get to play a very small role in prosecuting the ring leaders of the air bag theft organization.
Satisfying conclusion!
Some grabbed the iPad out of my hand while I was getting off the bus in Los Angeles and I chased him yelling “stop thief”, and a police officer completed the chase and got it back. I think a report was entered, and I recall the cop saying “don’t worry it’s probably his third strike and he’ll be away for life” or something, which didn’t actually make me feel better.
I'm a bit surprised that grabbing an iPad is a felony and the cop was probably being more flippant than factual, but I just want to point out that that's likely the tip of the iceberg as as that person goes. Who knows how many people he's hurt or lives he's derailed. A guy who will rip an iPad out of a stranger's is pretty likely to financially support the drug trade, to break into houses, destroy property while trying to rip out copper wires or catalytic converters. 3 strikes is a lot! If you living in free society actually matters/mattered to that criminal, all he has to do is not try to destroy said society!
Robbery is a felony, at least in any state I’ve lived in.
Whether a theft is a felony or misdemeanor has a lot to do with the value of what's stolen. A $1000 ipad is probably going to cross the threshold for felony in most jurisdictions.
What was described was larceny using force, i.e., robbery. Robbery is always a felony - the degree of seriousness depends not on the value of the property but on the level of force or threat used or available.
Forgive me for derailing this to a completely unimportant direction but: how do you determine the valuation for an item with dynamic price hovering on the threshold ?? First in terms of time (these things can lose value fast): is it the price purchased or At the time the crime was committed or by the time of the trial or what? Secondly is it some “market rate”
Or the retail listing ? Does it matter if the victim bought it used or at significant discount ?
I'm rusty on these things, so someone with better information can give a better answer. But it's basically the fair market value at the time of the theft.
How is that determined? Through evidence, which could include expert witnesses familiar with the market or some sort of sales data such as records of eBay sales of the same item at that time.
It is a question of fact for the "trier of fact" such as a jury or if there is no jury, the judge to decide. So both sides, the prosecution and defense, could present their evidence and then the trier decides. Much of the time it would not be a contested issue and the value is stipulated to.
It mostly doesn't matter what the victim paid, if anything, they could have received it as a gift and therefore paid nothing. On the other hand, if they paid $X that morning in an arm's length transaction that is at least evidence, not necessarily conclusive, that X is the market value.
You know I’m relatively on the law and order side on these threads but Getting someone a life sentence for committing petty crime three times is a gross miscarriage of Justice. Life sentences should be reserved for killers.
Forceful robbery seems like more than a petty crime. I'll give it to you that Ken's description is a pretty light-touch use of force, and quite possibly DA's wouldn't charge it that way for just the reason you're saying. But still...maybe don't go out of your way to commit a felony if you've already been convicted of two previous one?
And it may be punished by prison! But even robbery at gun point shouldn’t merit a lifetime sentence ! The punishment should fit it’s crime! A pattern of criminal behavior is good consideration to give the felon a punishment towards the legal maximum but never beyond that!
Sure, life is probably too long even for a patter. But the pattern is probably more important than the particulars of the specific crime, simply because it's the single most predictive element.
The 3 strikes law aims to address that predictiveness: 3 time felons seldom reform, and statistically speaking, multiple felons are responsible for a hugely disproportionate share of all crime, bc/ the crimes they've been convicted of are usually the tip of the iceberg. Whether that's unjust has an element of subjectivity.
Yeah, a snatch-and-run by someone with significant criminal history seems worthy of a few months in jail, but not decades.
You can’t punish someone for a crime the didn’t yet commit!
Someone grabbing an ipad is probably primarily just trying to support a drug addiction. It would be more cost efficient both in financial and human costs to find a different solution than lock him up for life.
I recognize treating drug addiction is complex, but if we could do a better job of that we could reduce a lot of low level crimes and improve our stock of human capital at a much lower cost than long time imprisonment.
I think we could make some real headway in crime if we could figure out a way to make opioid addiction as cheap as alcohol addiction. Nobody snatches ipads to buy rotgut vodka.
“…probably primarily just trying to support a drug addiction”
Not in this brave new world:
https://newmoneyreview.com/index.php/2023/05/04/a-phone-grabber-could-drain-your-bank-account-in-minutes/
No one really knows how to find another solution, and most drug addicts don't resort to strong-arm robbery and violent crime. I'm all for it if you know a good way.
From what I understand, the price of heroin and meth has plummeted 50-90% over just the past 5 years. Meth used to be cooked up in American labs, but now much more efficient, cheaper labor and larger Mexican labs produce it and ship it north. Heroin's way cheaper because fentanyl is basically a multiplier on heroin potency.
So I think we are much closer to them being as cheap as alcohol, if not actually there already.
I’ve been *in* them...
Say more.
It’s more fun if I don’t, though, isn’t it? 🤣
Quite a few, actually. When I lived in a SFH in DC (described above, sold in 2016), my house was broken into multiple times and my detached garage a couple of times (bike/tools stolen). I was assaulted by a mentally ill woman who tried to pull me out of the driver's seat of my car. My wallet was stolen from the (locked) locker of my posh gym. I was involved in our Neighborhood Watch, and reporting such crimes was encouraged (didn't do me any good in terms of apprehension or getting my stuff back).
In NYC I was technically assaulted by a large man who shoved me hard in a park, but there were no cops around (thank goodness a kind dude distracted the mentally ill man so I could get away).
I’ve had two altercations with mentally I’ll or drug addicted homeless people. One happened when I was volunteering and feeding the homeless dinner on the street. One dude came up to another and slapped the styrofoam container out of his hand and they started getting into it so me and another dude interceded to break it up. No police report was filed then.
The second time was when I was outside of a salad place and this homeless guy was yelling at customers (saying horrible racist and homophobic things to everyone who went in). I asked him to “cool it” and he gave me a shove and called me a faggot. At that point the strip mall security guard came over and the homeless guy bolted.
I feel very fortunate that 1) those were the only two scraps I’ve been in with those unhinged people and 2) those incidents didn’t escalate.
One of the reasons I rarely go to some of my favorite museums and parks anymore with my daughter is fear of getting into an altercation with one of these people. You have no idea where something will go when someone is so far mentally untethered.
I feel similarly lucky. But these experiences have certainly affected my perception of my surroundings. I'm a 5'2" woman, in good shape for my (old!) age but it would be very easy for a normal- or large-sized person (as both of the people described above were) to hurt me if minded to do so.
I'm so sorry that some of your favorite places are now off-limits to visit with your daughter. As an urbanist and city planner, this is exactly what I worry about when people dismiss antisocial behavior in public spaces as a serious problem. I understand that these are complex and difficult problems, but the situation you describe is terrible for you and your family (and those institutions, and the city) and does nothing to help the mentally ill people on the streets.
I'm sorry Lindamc, my wife won't go by herself lots of places in LA proper now because of being a smallish woman and feeling unsafe. She's had a couple of scary incidents but luckily has been able to get away without issue even if she was harassed verbally.
These things have really made me much less sympathetic to the so called "homeless advocates" and the liberal disposition in LA around this issue.
I'm considering going to LA this fall with my young kid and I'm worried enough about mentally ill people that I'm sort of planning the trip around where I think they might be. Do you have any advice or popular places that should be avoided? How is Los Feliz / Griffith Park area nowadays?
Oh man, my best friend had a beautiful place right off of Los Feliz by the main road to Griffith Park but had to move because of this one homeless (sometimes naked guy) that would run around his neighborhood and one time threw a brick at his window (luckily it bounced off and the dude ran away). The cops just let the guy run wild for months.
During the day you'll mostly be okay other than random meth and fentanyl addicts pan handling a little aggressively or talking to themselves but the evening and early morning hours can be pretty bleak. Some days are worse than others and you may have a perfectly lovely experience if you are only there for a few days.
Griffith Park itself is actually still pretty nice and clean. I haven't had any issues going to the observatory or the hiking trails there. Los Feliz/SIlverlake/Echo Park are all pretty grimy these days.
Wow and thanks - sorry to pepper you with one more question but is it noticeably worse than it was in 2017, which is when I left? There were definitely some sketchballs bad then, too, mostly on certain streets, but you could run into them almost anywhere.
I have two friends I keep in touch with who still live in the general area, and one is prone to exaggerate in the negative direction and the other is prone to claim I'm being somehow "fooled by right-wingers" for even asking if crime has gotten worse there.
It has gotten worse, no question. Now, it isn't like mad max and the thunder dome or anything. You can still have a relatively normal day and relatively normal weeks. It's really just the frequency of negative interactions or feelings of less public order that are creeping in more often. I think right wingers exaggerate but I also know left wingers who make constant apologies and say things like "well it's better than living in those RaCiSt SuBuRbS".
in NYC it was enough hassle that I'd probably not do it again unless I needed the insurance paperwork or something really serious had happened. But for basic stolen stuff, there's just no point.
Just once for me: someone stole my rear license plate, which wasn't something that was even on my radar as a potential crime. Realistically the Baltimore police weren't going to pull me over for driving without a plate anyway, but I wanted to have some sort of proof to show while I waited on a replacement just in case.
The only other time I've been a victim of a crime I didn't report it. A friend from out of town was staying with us and forgot to lock the door when he got back late. A homeless guy was trying all the doors and tried to steal my friend's backpack. My friend caught him and shooed the guy out of the house, then woke me up to ask if we should call the police. I asked him whether the guy was still there, he said no and I said doesn't sound like the police can do anything then.
When my friend tells this story a lot of people say "you should've had a gun!" Which seems to me like a crazy reaction. The situation was resolved without escalating into violence, whereas if a gun had been pulled it'd have been guaranteed escalation.
Same thing happened to me. They actually replaced it with another plate and fortunately I noticed it the same day and reported it. I would have hated to have been pulled over after someone committed armed robbery with my license plate.
I did one when someone broke in to my car about 15 years ago and stole $200 I had received as Christmas present the night before at a family event (I had accidently left the money in the car).
Still very suspicious the only time in my entire life my car was broken into was the night I received the cash - literally have never had more than $20 in the car before or since and never been broken into (that night it was pillaged).
Three times, two car break-ins and one hit-and-run while I was on my bike. Twice, both in DC, the cop asked me out. Very awkward.
I had someone blow up my car when I was 18, I definitely filed a police report for that.
If we're being technical, they doused it in an accelerant and lit it on fire, but you know, same thing.
Someone broke into my car and stole my laptop when I was in Beverley Hills. I obviously didn't have any real hope of it being recovered but I had to file a police report so my insurance would cover it.
While I realize most crimes are more about opportunity than maximizing value, I'm still a bit shocked that my Ford Fiesta got targeted in that location. Surely you're going to find something better than my old laptop if you do your smash and grab on the Lambo or whatever in the same parking lot?
I've called in a few people passed out unsheltered in the winter. Oh, and I called in one time when I saw a woman with a baby asking random people where she could get "a hit." Not really reports though.
The most police interaction I've had came from being on a city bus that hit an older woman. Had several phone calls from different police people asking me to detail what I saw & heard (and another later from a private investigator representing the victim). So I guess that kind of incident gets investigated quite thoroughly.
I have had my house broken into twice and called the police both times. They asked me a bunch of questions and took notes. Is that filing a police report? There was follow up in both cases. The second time involved dusting for fingerprints and showing both me and my daughter a photo line up. They came so close to arresting someone for the crime each time, but as far as I know never got there.
I mean, without knowing about the longitudinal trend in your neighborhood the old people aren't self-evidently wrong here. Leaving your car doors unlocked and *not* having rotten teens ransack them for valuables at 4:42 AM is also a thing people do in various places.
Many years ago I moved from Atlanta to Boston with all my possessions in a Honda Accord. The night before I left on this drive, someone stole my car stereo. I’m normally against any kind of corporal punishment, but I may have fantasized about some things during that long drive.
No police report, though. Once filed a police report in New Orleans (lived Uptown, near Tulane) after a guy broke into my apartment while my girlfriend was asleep (I was already at work). Guy started robbing the place, realized she was there, thankfully took off.
This is only tangential to the piece but it reminds me how the academic discourse around crime is about rates, while most people think safety is measured in absolute number of crimes (just like how academics consider "good schools" to be schools that lead to the most student growth, while normies consider good schools to be the ones with the highest average student scores)
Lots of good debate on the value of crime rates even within academia!
The post alludes to this, but even within cities, there’s good reason to be suspicious about how well crime rates represent what’s happening in neighbourhoods. The clearest example is how downtown areas often have the “worst” crime rates, but that also tends to be because downtowns/commercial areas have relatively low populations (eg people who actually live in the area) but very high levels of through-traffic, so the ‘crimes per person’ stat gets wildly distorted, which leads to some (imo) poor policy choices. There’ve been some interesting efforts to use other denominators (eg crimes per the number of cell phones), so it’ll be interesting to see how those rates change!
I’ve often thought, for this reason, that it would be helpful to get some useful estimates of “actual population” of various places (cities and neighborhoods) based on how many people are physically present at various times of day, rather than the simpler official measure which counts the number of people that officially reside there (regardless of whether some are out of town for work or vacation at any point, while others are in town for work or tourism).
More US downtowns should have a mix of commercial and residential uses, like Vancouver, BC.
% seem better than #. Is Podunk population 25 safer than NYC even if all 25 are victims of crime?
Oh I agree with you. I was making a positive statement, not a normative one.
People love their counting stats...home runs, interceptions, etc...
I guess I was limiting my thinking to cities within the US. Like, people generally think New York is more dangerous than Louisville or Birmingham, for example.
Reminds me of Twitter right-wingers trying to cope with NYC being objectively pretty safe by arguing that “crimes per square mile” should be the salient statistic
"Crime per square mile" seems like it has some degree of intuitive appeal, to be fair.
Crime in general and violent crime specifically (with the obvious exception of domestic violence) seems more likely to occur at street level than indoors, and the amount of street square footage in NYC is constant whereas buildings can increase population without increasing footprint. This means that both total crimes and (arguably more important to people, and probably the right stat to focus on for salience, broadly defined) the visible perception of crime and disorder are functions of area more than of population. The base of 125th St train station in NYC is incredibly sketchy as an area to be in, not as a function of likelihood of victimization per 1,000 people (even if the latter data is also very useful to have and relevant to know!).
Extending the NYC-centric metaphor, two guys getting into a fight on a subway car (or engaging in "showtime") ruins the ride whether there are 10 people or 200 people in the car - at a certain level crime-per-place rather than crime-per persons really is an appropriate locus of salience, certainly as applied to the feeling of comfort or discomfort in particular environs. Adding more people *can* potentially dilute the subjective effect of disorder but my priors are that this occurs at a pretty unfavorable rate - AIUI Times Square of all places used to be a hotbed of sleaze and criminality before Giuliani undertook to remake it, and I have a hard time believe that it wasn't well-trafficked.
I guess it depends on whether you are worried about being involved in a crime or seeing one.
I think people can reasonably be concerned about both - ultimately all wellbeing is subjective, after all,. "Being in a bad neighborhood" and the distaste people have for it is in one sense arguably a matter of perceiving the latter, but it's both intrinsically uncomfortable in and of itself and objectively concerning as increasing the likelihood of the former.
I don’t think people really distinguish between seeing crime and perceiving a significant personal risk. If a house on my block experiences a home invasion, it will make me feel less save regardless of the number of houses on my block. If I witness a robbery, I won’t take any solace in the density of the neighborhood. Rationally, these things should matter. But humans are not entirely rational.
One-stop shopping for crime paranoia and NIMBYism.
Maybe their impressions are based less on data than on movies and TV.
Off topic completely, but I think I need to say this to you and don't know a better way to do this. It's ok to say "my bad" regarding your willingness to engage Richard Hanania. I absolutely do think there are some bad faith commentators out there who are saying or insinuating that you support or gave positive feedback to Richard's most odious views even before the latest revelations came out.
Having said that, I've cringed at commentators (including yourself) giving voice or engaging with this guy even before the latest revelations. I honestly did not know who this guy was until the Russia invasion of Ukraine and then suddenly he popped up in my Twitter mentions as someone saying Russia is going to easily conquer Ukraine. So far, not so terrible; a whole lot of people on all sides of the political spectrum thought Russia would win easily. But once he popped in my Twitter feed, I started wondering who this guy was. And immediately it became clear that his worldview was coming from a pretty troubling place. For example, it seemed really clear to me that he thinks we failed in Afghanistan because we were somehow too committed to advancing girls' rights and somehow too committed to feminism or something. I say this to be kind of critical of you and say it wasn't that hard to discern even from this published writings that he had some problematic views.
But I'll say these are things I concluded or was able to discern from reading his writings. It was not necessarily explicitly said verbatim as I wrote it. So there is sort of a "plausible deniability" aspect to what he wrote if that makes sense. So I do understand to a certain degree where you are coming from. You are committed to the idea that you need to engage with people who have policy positions and beliefs opposed to your own. Sometimes those people have what appear to be troubling world views, but it's not a 100% clear how troubling so in the meantime maybe it's worth listening to what they have to say when their more troubling worldviews aren't front a center a part of their arguments or when it is seemingly not relevant to a topic being discussed.
But then new revelations like the latest ones come out and make clear that a) his troubling worldviews are much much more troubling than we first thought and they were fairly troubling in the first place b) it's clearly a much more front of center part of their general worldview on a variety of topics.
Which is why I think my conclusion is it's ok to give a mea culpa. I do think you were a little too willing to listen to someone who's views were probably not worth platforming or engaging with. But again, it comes from a general place I can get behind which is willingness to engage with different viewpoints. But now that you "how deep the rot is" so to speak, you can say I was little too willing to engage with this person and shouldn't have been as credulous and willing to do so.
Hanania had already published deeply racist material before being "doxxed." Like...I don't know why respectable liberals pundits allowed him to be part of their circle to begin with. The guy advocated for mass incarceration of black men without cause just a few months ago! Following well-spoken racists doesn't make you heterodox, it makes you an asshole.
I suppose it's okay because he praises Asians' IQ to drive a wedge between them and black people? Gotta own the DEI woke libs, right?
When your initial defense is "I always knew he was racist," it's time to touch grass and reevaluate who you choose to interact with online.
Also worth noting that a lot of the things that are interesting about Hanania’s work are also signals that you probably shouldn’t be friends with him. He’s the conservative writer who’s probably most clear-eyed and honest about the personal characteristics of the typical American conservative, the real motives behind a lot of conservative attitudes about social issues (including his own), and the legal/institutional implications of what a real policy “war on wokeness” would entail.
But anybody who can see and understand all of those things and still align with the contemporary American conservative movement is showing you that… they’re just kind of a bad person.
I had always thought the main issue with “safest city” and “most dangerous city” lists was that they left out the biggest factor in safety and danger by focusing only on crime. I want to know my chance of being killed, and I don’t really care whether I am killed by crime or by car crash. Interesting to know that these lists are really bad even just on crime!
Really confused by the crime reporting statistics. Do 25% of people whose car is stolen not call police? And I’m really surprised that domestic violence reporting is so high - I had always read victims may be reluctant/unable to report but it’s reported just as much as things like trespassing.
Trespassing sounds like a crime that would be underreported.
This. It’s almost circular-you have already escalated to a point where you are near reporting to the police before it becomes a crime. As a practical matter, it’s probably almost all businesses who are inclined to follow through once giving the appropriate notice.
Unless you have insurance that will make good your loss, low level property and vandalism are likely not seen as worth your time in reporting, especially in a larger city where they're really not going to be able to do much about catching the perpetrator of getting your stuff back.
Yeah, but do 25% of people really have their car stolen and go "nah it's fine".
Uninsured undocumented immigrants who are victims of car thefts, etc. One thing most often missed in these discussions is the demographics of victims often skew heavily toward vulnerable populations who are less likely to report to the police.
Coincidentally, I just saw a story about a woman who had just moved to my town and had all her earthly possessions in her car. It was stolen, and she didn’t report it!! Or she didn’t until after asking for advice on a Facebook group. It was stunning.
Yawn.
Okay fine no list. But you're underplaying how important good crime stats are to people living in an area or looking to move to one.
How many people decided to avoid a neighborhood because they saw a liquor store they didn't like, or a group of people from a race they didn't like? People will absolutely resort to racial and other biases in the absence of better data.
I get that it's a very difficult data collection exercise, but is NeighborhoodScout worse than "I saw an abandoned gas station and that scares me"? I'm not so sure!
Maybe Democrats should do an everything bagel crime bill consisting of inter alia, a) a national Police Academy b) big money in NAS for crime, policing, prosecution, prison, social science research, c) money for police departments to report crimes according to a uniform methodology d) subsidies for technology like position trackers for people on parole/conditional release (useful for people awaiting hearing for asylum and irregular entry cases, too), surveillance and traffic control cameras, DNA database of everyone passing through the justice systems e) more prosecutors, court personnel, and police officers including para-police officers that handle administrative and most traffic and public order events.
I don't think that bill would qualify as an "everything bagel," because all those things are pretty closely related to crime and enforcement. The EB version would include a bunch of green policies, arcane rules about procurement (e.g., small and minority-owned business requirements, overwrought bidding processes), maybe some childcare stuff, etc.
Separately, if such a bill led to better (increased) reporting, you can just imagine the dumb attack ads: "...and Senator So-and-So championed the TK Crime Act, which led to a 30% increase in violent crime nationwide."
I am always skeptical of Top # Cities In America lists because everyone has different values on how to judge the best cities, and from my experience, the top two criteria that I most see actual people cite are family (which is individualized for every person) and weather (preference of which is about as subjective as it gets).
Not used to seeing the comment section this empty (which is also called never being awake at 3:30 I suppose)
Anyway, while I understand why it happens, it's frustrating that there are a ton of these click-baity lists doing things with data that are this clearly not intended. My standards for these sites aren't very high, but somehow they still manage to fall short
The utility of comparing cities of 25,000 with ones having hundreds of thousands or millions of residents seems limited. Indeed, the whole concept of ranking places using one-year data, especially given the wide variation with respect to reporting statistics, is sick. Every one of us has a stake in reducing crime everywhere.