You can’t be serious. 30 per 1000 versus 19 per 1000 isn’t a big deal? We’re talking about violent crimes here, not shoplifting.
“Second, in general, while criminality may be lower in the suburbs, it really is not all that much lower than it is in the city.”
No, suburbs are safer. Fact. Define ‘not all that much’. For some people, ‘not all that much’ is all it takes. Is every suburb safer than every city, of course not. But in general they are safer and it is completely understandable that people would choose to live in safer locations. That just seems logical to me.
Wrong again. Suburban police reporting rates are just as high, if not higher in many instances, than urban police reporting rates. See table 15, page 10 here.
The data do not support the perception of the safety of suburbs exhibited here and even in the other thread. Violent crimes are only incrementally less likely to be committed in the suburbs than they are in the cities on average. If a suburb apologist here were to argue that a 1% decrease in the likelihood of being the victim of a violent crime justifies his flight from the city, I would accept that completely. That 1% decrease would simply be worth more to him than it is to me. We all have different thresholds about which we make life decisions.
But at least the apologist would be honest. He would not deny that there is nontrivial criminality and social ill in the suburbs, or that any evidence of such just represent isolated instances of “bad parenting”.
I don’t think these stats paint the picture you want them to paint.
If 30 out of every 1000 people in a city is a victim of a violent crime, that covers what, one city block? Less? Whereas the suburban crime rate is lower to begin with and due to the lower population density covers several miles of people. The perception and the reality is that suburbs are safer. The perception then makes them seem considerably so.
You’re killing me here. Are you even reading this stuff?
The NVCS survey on which this study is based does not include categories for the purchase, sale, or abuse of controlled substances/narcotics, illegal consumption of alcohol, drunk driving, or other categories of crime characterized by my above cites.
You made an assertion with no evidence, how was I supposed to know you were going to shift the goal posts around? I provided a cite that shows that police reporting is just about = between urban/suburban areas. Do you really expect that it will be that different for the other categories? If so, please provide proof, and no, your cheesy ERIC cites aren’t good enough.
I agree, and I would add this: It appears to me that of the crimes which do take place in the suburbs, a much greater percentage (compared to cities) are between, intimates, family members, or people who otherwise already know eachother.
Thus, the disparity in stranger crimes is probably a lot bigger than the 50% in Maeglin’s statistics.
Let’s try to think about this another way. Consider the probability that your house will be struck by lightning. Using some assumptions handily provided by the National Lightning Safety Institute, we will conclude that the probability is 1 / 280,000.
One of the assumptions is the size of your house. The NLSI assumes a house of 1200 m^2. Suppose you buy a bigger house, and that probability increases to 1/250,000.
Living in a smaller house is, by any absolute measure, safer.
But it doesn’t take any handwaving to show that this is retarded, because really, who the hell cares about such a tiny incremental difference?
In the case of crime, clearly people do care about an incremental difference of, say, 1%. But then they should be at least honest and say that this difference is small but important to them. What is absolutely safer here is totally irrelevant because actual decisions are made on the margin.
I provided several cites, all of which were about unsafe behaviors like drinking, drugs, and drunk driving. I have not moved the goalposts at all. Your responses have just been somewhat nonresponsive and irrelevant.
I am dubious of your ability to judge whether a cite is “cheesy” or not given that I had to explain statistical significance to you.
What? Where are you getting 1% from? The numbers are all posted above, why don’t you use the real numbers? How did the Lightning Safety Institute (LSI) come into play?
Think about what you just said for a moment. How many of your neighbors do you know in a suburb versus in a city? How many clerks at local shops? At your video store? Other parents of kids in your school district?
In suburbs and small towns, everyone knows everyone. In cities, they don’t. Go figure.
The difference in the violent crime aggregate rates between urban and suburban areas is fewer than 10 cases per thousand. .01.
The lightning safety issue was an illustrative example. Justin_Bailey understands my argument whereas you do not. I was hoping that a more extreme example would help. Apparently I was wrong.
What do they have to do with police reporting? They are simplistic case studies, ultimately meaningless for the scale of this topic. As requested, please provide a cite that backs up your claims or I will assume you cannot.
“given that I had to explain statistical significance to you”
Please… Your ‘explanations’ have been entertaining though. I’m impressed by the LSI reference…
Something I would like to see data is on the variation in violent crime based on cohort.
As most violent crime is committed between people who know each other, how likely is it for someone who doesn’t interact with a violent element to be affected by urban violence?
Personally I feel as safe in New York as I did in my small-town hometown where I hear stories of drive-bys and gang feuds from my family regarding people THEY KNOW PERSONALLY.
Basically what I am wondering is if I who am not engaging with a violent element would really be safer statistically in the suburbs than I am now.
4 in a thousand vs 2 in a thousand (according to your OWN crime stats) is WAY the hell different than 1 in 250,000.
Please don’t go into engineering or the sciences. Oprah does enough damage as it is.
Not the mention being a victim of crime is probably almost always worse in more ways than one than a random lighting strike.
Could I interest you in a lottery ticket B? It cost more than lottery ticket A and has less of the other benifits that might concern you, yet your chances of winning are less. Or to put it another way, your chances of loosing are significantly higher. For the dense, A is the suburban ticket, B is the urban ticket.
Could you expand on this a bit without using euphemism? What’s the causation there, in your estimation? And what does “tends to be rather unpleasant” mean?