New York — which is where I happen to live — isn’t just safe relative to other big cities. The data in the above chart are from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local police departments, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also keep track of homicides as reported on death certificates, and one can sort them by, among other things, whether they befell residents of a county that contains all or part of the biggest city in a large (population of one million or more) metropolitan area, a fringe (suburban) county in such a metropolitan area, or elsewhere. Suburban counties in large metro areas have tended to have the lowest homicide rates, but New York City’s was even lower from 2017 to 2019 and was only slightly higher in 2020, the most recent year for which the CDC has full data…
Some causes of death other than homicide seem pretty relevant to assessing safety. Your risk of getting killed on the subway or in a subway station is much higher in New York City than in a place with no subway, for example, but if you add up all risks related to getting to work or school or wherever else it is you need to go, it’s a different story. New Yorkers are only about as third as likely to die in transportation accidents of any kind as Americans are overall. Put homicide and transportation risks together, and New York starts looking like a refuge from the American carnage.
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