![Perceptions of Safety Unrelated to Actual Violent Crime Rate [OC]](https://preview.redd.it/bj8wh9ez4g1d1.png?auto=webp&s=d0544336003f905b15536add0f185f3d74ea33f0)
Perceptions of Safety Unrelated to Actual Violent Crime Rate [OC]
OCCorrect, also the % safe scales don't go to 100% and are different chart to chart.
Correct. But the issue with the data is that when you ask if someone feels "safe," you're not just talking about violent crime. Someone can feel a city is unsafe (for example, New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco) because of car burglaries and theft. In fact, that's likely one of the contributors to why those 3 cities have the lowest "% safe" bars out of everything below Chicago despite relatively low violent crime rates. If the data eliminated that variable by graphing a combined violent+property crime compared to % safe, that would make the data truly beautiful.
Going by property crime, New York is still the lowest among those listed here. Boston is quite low, Los Angeles is lower than I expected, but Seattle and San Francisco were higher than most others. And for whatever reason Republicans seem to think Dallas is very safe compared to the others despite being among the worst of these cities in both violent and property crime.
The point is most people have no idea what the data shows. Our perceptions of safety are largely formed based on the media we use, including news, TV, movies, and social media. Political ideology plays a significant role in what types of media use. For example, right-wing news media likes to paint New York as a dangerous place. I've taken right-leaning folks into New York, and they've expressed concern about safety. While you should always be aware of your surroundings and take general precautions, I always find it quite amusing because their perception is often far from reality.
for whatever reason Republicans seem to think Dallas is very safe compared to the others despite being among the worst of these cities
Kinda odd to point out that Republicans think that, when Dallas' % Safe rating is basically identical between Dems and Republicans :P
But on a larger note - this paints the cities as a homogeneous experience with uniform risk throughout. I don't know about all violent crime, but several years ago I dug into Chicago's homicide numbers a bit. Something like 90% of victims and perpetrators were non-white. I did not get into how the numbers lined up with other factors - neighborhood, income/poverty/employment, etc. - but it's pretty clear that the safety of someone living in Chicago's middle class white neighborhoods is very different from someone living in the South Side.
For me, as an educated, employed white person who lived in the Edgewater neighborhood, my risk of falling victim to violent crime wasn't so different from what it was in the rural Midwestern towns where I grew up.
I think they were commenting more on the fact that the Republican perception of Dallas is so much different than their perception of other (non-Texas) cities. I picked up on the same thing. It's like they don't realize that - despite being located in a Red state - Dallas is solidly blue (just like most cities).
ah, gotcha
I came here for this comment: you can live in a large city and be oblivious to actual crime (Manhattan vs Bronx). You can also live in the safest area and watch TV and feel like Mad Max is around the corner. Very much based on neighborhood, demographics, perception, etc.
Since 2020 the criminal element in Chicago has figured out that it makes much more sense to commit crimes in the more affluent areas of the city. Your risk of being a murder victim is still higher on the south and west sides, but your risk of armed robbery is now greater on the north/northwest side.
I noticed a direct correlation on this graph of places Republicans think are safe and places with fewer black folks. Unsurprising the three conservative-perceived “safest” cities are Dallas, Boston, Miami.
This data says, on average, Democrats feel 33% safer and Republicans feel 30% less safe.
Dallas is the only city dems are more sacred of than reps.
You shoot one (1) president and that party is scared of you forever...
In all seriousness, I'm genuinely curious why Republicans seem to feel so especially safe in Dallas. Seems like a notable outlier.
Dallas is the largest city in the country with a GOP mayor.
They managed that by having him get elected as a democrat and then changing horses mid term.
this will be houston as well. people got bamboozled.
I think it's more about him not jumping on the "defund the police" bandwagon
Which is funny because even in more “progressive” cities like LA and NYC they never actually “defunded the police”
Right .. but they TALKED about doing it. I made another comment that I'd love to see a correlation between this and media. For example, % of violent crime reporting on CNN vs FoxNews. How does that correlate to this data?
Only if it came with a corresponding with spending on non-police responses, and a metric of how safe the police actually were.
“Defund” was a stupid slogan, but “don’t send your violent response team to a mental health crisis” doesn’t have the same ring.
Is there a correlation between hiring more social workers and lower police brutality? Likely!
Not sure I understand your comment? The original data is about perception of safety base on political party. I was saying that I'd like to see a correlation between that perception and violent crime reporting by various media outlets.
The top three safest big cities according to Republicans (that are listed on this chart) are Dallas, Houston, and miama (followed by Boston for some reason).
I'm going to posit that they're in republican states which Republicans tend to think are safe. On the flip side, every conservative news outlet likes to report on the rampant violent crime in the Democrat cities only, and especially places like Detroit, Chicago and NYC. These same news outlets don't talk about the crime in republican run big cities (although they will fear monger endlessly about the illegal immigrants running rampant throughout their states, they won't nail it down to a single city making that city feel unsafe).
That's my guess at least
Live in the Mdiwest. Almost every Republican I've spoken to basically thinks all of Chicago is a gang warzone.
Boston is just safe in general tbh. That’s why both sides rate it so safe, despite being a leftist city
It’s also extremely white (at least, in the view of conservatives who don’t live there)
Look at Houston. Texas is a red state whose cities haven't been demonized by right wing politicians or movies and TV.
Because it’s one of the more conservative major cities in the US and it’s extremely suburbanized
I'm genuinely curious why Republicans seem to feel so especially safe in Dallas.
Its the prototypical Texas city. Texas = Republican = White Texans with gun and cowboy hat
Probably because that's the city on this list where you're most surrounded by Republicans. They are afraid of people that aren't like them.
Open carry states / good guy with a gun?
Because Texas.
While it doesn't say what it is, I'm positive that the difference (shown as 1%) is well within the margin of error for their survey.
Specifically in cities. Even though rural areas tend to have higher murder rates, I guarantee Republicans consider them safer than cities
It also looks like Republicans under estimate safety less than Democrats overestimate it.
I would refine that to say that Republicans believe cities to be unsafe. And given the material they're shown on conservative media outlets, it's not difficult to comprehend why.
In my experience, conversations with Republicans concerned about crime and safety in cities are usually people who live far away from and would never visit these cities.
Reminds me of the first time I visited Mardis Gras. I'd heard my whole life how it's a den of sin and dangerous. A Republican coworker was convinced that you can't catch the beads cuz they're all laced with fentanyl and there's a good chance you'll overdose. Ended up being just a chill party where people were getting high. But you know, drugs = danger, right?
I don't know that Mardi Gras is the best example... I've been 5 times. Absolutely love it. But it's 100% a den of sin and dangerous ha.
That's what makes it the perfect example. There's people that overestimate the dangers (and thus avoid it entirely), and there's people that underestimate the dangers. And there are predictors that trend along party lines at roughly the same rate as this data (openness, religiousness, xenophobia, etc.).
Are the dems and republicans people surveyed living in those cities, or just general people surveyed from those parties, regardless of where they live?
It's random people, not based jn the cities in question. Which kind of makes this data basically meaningless
No. This data demonstrates the impact of propaganda on perceptions of safety.
Yes, there is a concerted effort by "the media" and "the elites" to make people think New York is unsafe. Since most of them actually live in new york, it's their way of keeping the proles out of their city.
I think it's clearly a concerted effort by right wing media to push a narrative that Democrats are incapable of governing effectively, but I guess it could be your thing too.
%safe should be flipped so it’s %unsafe. Axes should be the same for the right 3 plots. This is so hard to read.
Would be great as a scatter plot with homicide rate on one axis and %safe on the other… so many better ways to present this
I don’t remember the last time I saw a truly excellent data visualization on this subreddit 😓
Worth pointing out that the samples were taken from random Americans, not people who actually live in those cities.
From the source (which OP didn't link to. I had to click through to the thread they were "inspired by" to find it.) here is how the question was phrased:
Now thinking about some large cities, both those you have visited and those you have never visited, from what you know and have read, do you consider each of the following cities to be safe to live in or visit, or not?
As for the premise of this chart, I think that average Americans' perceptions of these cities are based on what they see on the news, which is generally not petty crime. It's murder and rape. It's also protests and the occasional riot. The original chart would be more informative on that note.
For people actually living in cities, they are generally more concerned with petty crime since that's a bigger threat to everyday life for most people.
And people of means who live in cities also tend to believe they are safe. If they didn't feel safe, they'd probably move. Only the poor don't move, and proximity to crime is generally linked to poverty.
I think part of the problem is sheer nominal numbers vs per capita numbers. If people hear about things happening in New York all the time, they'll assume it's a lawless hellhole. More "news worthy" crimes are going to happen in NY, Chicago, LA, etc because there are simply way more people there than some little farm town, even if the likelihood is lower that something would personally happen to any individual.
Think about the other side of the coin though.
I grew up in a small town of 1500 people. 1500.
Our crimes that were committed, at most, and the "most violent," was trespassing.
The last murder that happened in our town, that was 100% confirmed, was 30 years before I moved there.
"A lot of people" doesnt exactly mean the city is safe. A lot of crimes are NOT violent. The graph above only covers "Violent crimes" IE assuming where someone is directly hurt or injured.
If you factored in thefts etc, the numbers would look much much worse. IE the cities would look wayyyyy more unsafe.
Motor theft break ins, in san francisco, alone, JUST breaking INTO the car is 818 per 100k. IE, more than their violent crimes they have in the graph above.
And I do tons of contract work across the united states as a project manager. A ton of contractors I used to use for san fran have effectively told me "Im not going into San Fran anymore. My tools are continuously stolen there, or almost stolen there." And I offered those guys some REALLY good money. Even for san fran, and they STILL wont go. I had on more than ONE occasion in the span of a year in san fran where a guy walks into a hardware store to get half inch bolts and walk out and their vehicles were broken into.
That city is the car break in KING right now and people just go "well at least its not violent."
The city I live in NOW where crime is considered low, has 150k people in it and I notice more crime here and indeed do feel less safe
Last night in the next town over which is much larger I literally witnessed a hit and run.
None of this shit happens in small towns if ever and its not due to volume of people. Im really sick of people saying "More people = more crimes" when thats positively false. European cities much larger than US ones on the regular usually and used to have way less crime.
It’s understandable that crime gets a lot of attention and being a victim can be truly traumatizing. That said, it has been sensationalized by the press and politicized by the Right. “Safety”, however, does not merely refer to the crime rate. All cause mortality is much, much higher in rural areas than urban ones. Indeed, the top 10 causes of death are higher in rural areas.
Instead of endless debates and finger-pointing, we all would be better off if crime was understood to be a collective problem since it stems from national (often global) issues such as income inequality, racism, unequal education and community resources, drug usage and declining economic growth. The same approach should be applied to problems in more rural areas, including inadequate healthcare, low wages, gun deaths, poor access to public facilities and programs among others. Such pervasive problems belong to all of us as do the potential solutions. Improvements, meanwhile, benefit everyone.
Thanks for digging this up.
The fear of Manhattanization looks really silly in the context that New York City is one of the richest and safest cities in the country. Cities should want to copy it!
This came up a lot on social media in the runup to the 2022 midterm elections, when the GOP was testing out as a line of attack that Democrats were pro-crime. They’d talk about how scary NYC was, despite it being one of the safest locations in the United States, rural communities and suburbs included.
A couple weeks ago, there was a post that got to the top of reddit where a conservative news dude went to NYC for trumps trial expecting it to be awful. He ended up reporting that he was really enjoying his time there lol
I went to college in Atlanta and my parents, who live in Suburbia, Florida, never visited while I lived there until my graduation, and hadn't been there since probably the 70's or 80's. This was a couple months after then-president Trump called the city "crime-infested" and "falling apart" as a way of attacking our congressman, so they were fully expecting to find that I lived in the ghetto and that everything would be dirty and there'd be homeless people everywhere. But no, they were impressed at how beautiful Midtown was, I took em to the aquarium that afternoon after my graduation, they had a great time and came away with a changed opinion about the city.
After the CHOP zone and BLM protests in Seattle, a lot of people tried to make it seem wholly unsafe in Seattle and tell others they're leaving the city because it's too dangerous.
I went there and didn't have any issues. Perception is their reality.
My MIL tried to warn us against visiting Seattle because it’s so dangerous after all that. We live in Chicago.
I was expecting more from Atlanta. Coming from NYC I always thought Atlanta would have been as busy and full of pop culture. I was surprised at how clean it was though.
It probably is, I was there for work so i only had a day at most to travel around. Definitely needed a car though.
Atlanta is definitely a city of its suburbs, tbh.
When people talk shit about me living in Chicago, I just say “yeah, not everyone can do it.” The same people usually have a tangled knot of masculinity-related insecurities, so it shuts them up.
New York City is one of the richest
NYC is certainly safe, but it is definitely not rich. It has a median household income of 75k, lower than the country as a whole. In comparison, Boston, Denver, DC, Seattle, Austin, Atlanta, Portland, Minneapolis, San Francisco, San Diego, San Jose etc all have higher median household incomes.
This might seem like a stain on NYC, but in some ways it isn't. Part of the reason why it has a relatively low median household income is because of its extensive rent stabilization and public housing programs, resulting in huge swaths of working class people who are able to live in the city instead of being displaced by extremely high rents.
Wtf NYC is below median income for US? How is that possible for our densest and most expensive city?
Not all of NYC is expensive but the expensive parts are exceptionally so.
Pretty much all of it is relative to median US
Staten Island has entered the chat
Staten Island is quite literally the richest borough.
Half the population lives in either rent regulated or public housing. Another 32% own their homes.
So you only have really 20-25% actually paying those astronomical prices you see on news headlines.
Compare metro areas, not just city limits. It can make a big difference when comparing things between cities, depending on the land area of the central city and where the poor vs rich neighborhoods are distributed. NYC metro is $91k as of 2022, which is still handily beaten by SF, Seattle, DC, Boston, and a few others, but it's closer to the top.
It's a little out of date and only shows the most populated 25 metros, but you can see a chart on page 6 here https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2023/acs/acsbr-017.pdf
Whether the metro is considered part of the city or not varies from city to city. Nobody considers north jersey to be a part of NYC. None of the suburbs are. You will get laughed at saying "im from nyc" if you are from westchester or suburban jersey. In Phoenix or Atlanta or Houston however, people generally just consider the entire metro area to be the city and use the name to describe it all.
You aren't wrong, but it doesn't apply to every city to use the metro area figure.
I don't think you understand the purpose of a metro area. The whole point is that it includes a city and all of its suburbs/commuter zone. Some city limits are tiny and only include a downtown area with a tiny portion of the economic population base, some include downtown and the old dense poor areas, and then some are huge and include all the suburban developments and go all the way out to farmland and forests. You need to compare metro areas in order to make apples to apples comparisons for statistics like income.
I understand the purpose, I am just saying its not always as clear cut as that. The suburbs are generally considered to be very distinct from the city. Long Island, North Jersey etc, these are connected to the city but are very much considered distinct from the city culturally and economically. Just an example but only around 350k people from new jersey commute to NYC for work out of nearly 4 million people in north jersey, which is very tiny percentage of workers for any suburb in the country. The fact that half of the metro area is in another state is also a big differential factor. And another major factor is that people in NYC don't really drive, and as a result almost entirely get around by the cities subway system, which doesn't go to the suburbs unless you take the LIRR. New Yorkers consider north jersey, long island, westchester etc to be distinct and separate areas, not an extension of the city.
Nobody in ridgewood NJ says "I live in new york". It is like someone in shenzen saying "I live in hong kong". Sure, both are part of the pearl river delta area, but statistically you shouldn't put them together in one basket.
So for that reason, using metro area is misleading. Not everywhere, but if you're comparing new york city to a place, you shouldn't really use it.
It's not about city identity or transportation dynamics, it's about the economics of an area. I'm from there and I'm well aware that the suburbs have distinct identities. It doesn't matter because the whole thing we're talking about is pay. If you just count NYC city limits that include the poverty in the Bronx and Brooklyn but not all of the wealth and high paying jobs in its suburbs, it's going to artificially look like pay is way lower than it really is.
If you have a retail job in Orange or Hempstead, it's still going to pay much more than in suburbs of Orlando or Indianapolis because the whole NYC metro area costs more and pays more. It doesn't matter whether you live in the downtown, the hood, or the suburbs of any of those places.
If you look at median income somewhere like Buffalo it's under $30,000 because the city limits are small and basically include just downtown and all of the low income areas, whereas when you include the metro area it's $63,000 because most of the middle and upper income people live outside the city limits. A comparable job in the city limits will still pay similarly to one outside of them.
On the other hand, Jacksonville is like 900 square miles and basically already includes its entire metro area so the whole thing is already fully counted.
To use your example, yes it makes sense to count Shenzhen as part of the Hong Kong metro area because someone working at a factory there probably makes a lot more than someone working the same job in a factory in the outskirts of a much cheaper place like Longnan.
Someone working at the industrial park in Hauppague is going to get paid more than one in the Cleveland suburbs because the NYC metro area pays way more than the Cleveland Metro area.
Right but my point is that the outer regions of the metro area (hudson valley, north jersey, and long island) are also economically isolated to an extent in a way that most suburbs aren't. People in north jersey mostly work in north jersey. Only around 15% work in NYC, which is a very low percentage for any suburban area. North Jersey is more just a economic area that is adjacent to NYC more than it is an extension of it.
Regardless, your point moreso applies to the entire northeastern megalopolis at that point. Cost of living and wages are higher all the way from Boston to DC. But they aren't really considered one singular metro area. Metropolitan area has more to do with commuting than it has to do with cost of living/wages.
The only part they'll copy is the sky-high rent.
I think there are reasons to not want to be like Manhattan outside of misinformed fears about crime.
True, but a huge portion of people that are afraid of cities have no concept of there being anything in between detached single family housing on large lots in subdivisions, and giant skyscrapers and section 8 housing projects. They act like putting in a new luxury 5-over-1 or a block of townhouses in high demand areas near the stores and restaurants is suddenly going to attract swarms of gangs and zombie homeless people.
As someone who actually likes Baltimore, I would have loved to see it in the chart.
I was wondering the same thing. Baltimore gets mentioned at least as frequently as D.C.
Are these opinions based on people all over the country or people living in the city? Although, I'm not sure you could find enough Republicans actually living in DC to have a statistically significant poll. LOL
Is there a similar lack of correlation for non-violent crimes? Pickpockets have a larger impact on the feeling of safety than hearing secondhand reports of armed robbery in your neighborhood.
Lol pickpocketing is vanishingly rare in the United States. Sure it happens, but not as much as straightforward muggings, which are less risky and yield more money.
Any time someone is going to a big city tourist area in Europe, they get that "Watch out for the pickpockets!" advice, but you rarely hear that advice when someone is going to an American city's tourist area.
Yes, because over here we will simply put a gun in your face and demand your valuables.
It was common for SF a few years ago, San Francisco was having a pickpocket and car break in spree before the pandemic. People on video fencing stolen goods at local parks and the police didn't do anything until the media made a huge fuss.
happens a lot in music clubs
I read about this a while back, and it's largely due to 3-strike laws. Skilled pickpockets use a team of up to 4 people, and 3-strike laws broke the training chain from master to apprentice.
Unfortunately that lead to a rise in mugging as a market subsitute for high-skilled pickpocketing.
We also have guns, unlike criminals in other developed nations, and so it’s just easier to mug someone. You get all of their stuff without as much risk of getting caught.
Pickpockets
Not a thing in the US.
Yeah here they just stick a gun to your head and take whatever they want.
Would love to see media consumption / reporting of violence by source against these.
Could you plot it on one of those charts that has three dots for each line, one for dems, one for republicans and one combined? And then overlay it onto the actual crime data? Trying to compare 4 datasets that are next to each other is makes it really hard to quickly draw any sort of conclusions or find patterns.
The problem here is that we don't know why you've chosen these particular cities. Are they chosen at random? How do these violent crime rates compare with the country as a whole? Not sure what to make of this as it is.
At first glance I believe those are the 15 most populous cities in the country.
Definitely not true.
Minneapolis only has 425k. Atlanta proper is 500k. Charlotte is over 800k. Austin nearly a million. Denver over 700k. Etc.
It looks like the top metro areas, but for some reason switched Phoenix for New Orleans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area
And skipping Orlando, but yeah, looks more like it.
Lol, definitely not.
It looks like the top metro areas, but for some reason switched Phoenix for New Orleans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area
I feel it's quite an odd choice, in a visualization where the goal is to be able to visually compare different segments against one another, that the bars are not next to each other or at least have representations of the relevant data on their bar as well. Trying to keep all the information in your head as you scan back and forth, left to right feels like it defeats the whole purpose.
What constitutes a violent crime?
This could easily be an argument of definitions rather than perceptions.
crime where violence was involved
I would consider a kid pushing an elder a violent crime, but SF and LA do not
Exactly my point. FBI defines violent crimes as murder, rape, robbery, and aggrivated assault.
Well the they also define it as "intent to cause severe bodily hard" ...well what about just moderate bodily harm...I'd consider that violence.
I would read these bars to basically say that actual crime weakly to moderately predicts perceived crime, but there's a big effect of city size that messes up perceptions. That is, if you pull out the three biggest cities/metros (New York/LA/Chicago), you can see a rough inverse correlation, with Boston being correctly perceived as having substantially less violent crime than Detroit and Atlanta being somewhere in the middle. The mere fact of the biggest cities being "the big city" seems to inflate perceptions somewhat.
In general, perceptions like this are highly influenced by rough stereotypes/images of a city and recent news coverage. New Orleans does indeed have a considerable amount of violent crime, but doggone it, we all love it and were thinking of po' boys and Mardi Gras. Dallas and Houston have expansive city limits with a lot of quiet suburban neighborhoods, which don't gel with traditional images of urban crime. Chicago isn't the worst in absolute terms but has seen an increase over a period when other cities decreased.
Fuck Dallas in particular..
~ all the people from Dallas.
Keep in mind that crime is not evenly distributed throughout a city.
For example, crime in Boston is higher in Drchester and Mattapan which are outside the touristy areas. So it may actually be safer for most people visiting.
Firstly, the "percent safe" should be inverted to be percent unsafe, so that both metrics increase with increasing crime.
Then, this would be better shown as a scatter plot, which is more typical for showing correlations (or lack thereof). Put actual crime rate along the X and the perception of safety on the Y, with each dot representing a city. You could include vertical "error bars" (not really error) to show democrat/republican differences. If there was no correlation at all, you'd expect the trend line for the scatter points to be more or less horizontal. You could overlay a red and blue trend like for democrat/republican
It's tempting to conclude "people's perceptions are wrong" here, but keep in mind that
- violent crime is only one aspect of public safety.
- official crime statistics can differ dramatically from reality because many crimes go unreported or are counted differently under different (official or unofficial) reporting practices.
- crime rate is a continuum whereas "do you feel safe?" is a binary choice question. Expecting the two to correlate is problematic to begin with.
I conclude that nothing can be concluded here with any certainty.
If you overlay this with mentions of crime on right-wing media, it'd be easier to conclude with certainty the point. That doesn't mean others won't come to the conclusion without the data. It's clear safety concerns are based on propaganda, that was clear without this data.
Tools used: Tableau
Sources:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/most-violent-cities-in-america https://www.safehome.org/resources/crime-statistics-by-state/
https://usafacts.org/data/topics/security-safety/crime-and-justice/crime-and-police/violent-crime-rate-per-100000-persons/
https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2022-crime-in-the-nation-statistics https://gitnux.org/most-dangerous-cities/
NOTE: I was inspired to create this post by another Reddit user who made a similar graph with murder rates instead of total violent crime rates: [OC] Perception of Crime in US Cities vs. Actual Murder Rates
Several comments complained that it was using the murder rate when there were so many other types of violent crimes besides murder; therefore, this version displays data using total violent crime rates instead.
Interesting data! It would be nice if you added a chart showing the gap between actual crime versus perceived (lack of) safety. Or, at a minimum used clustered bars and put both indicator in the same chart. It's a big mental load to compare the perceived versus actual safety as is.
Ideally, I'd also like to see the Dem vs Rep perceptions combined OR another chart showing the gap, to make it easier to see which cities are perceived differently depending on the political party.
Denser cities often have lower crime, but they can give the appearance of having more crime due to a smaller geographic area.
For example, if you live in a city that has 100,000 people, 10 square miles and 5 murders, those murders can feel further away than a city with the same population, same amount of murders, but is 1 square mile. In the smaller city, there's a good chance those murders happened close enough to you for you feel more dangerous even though it really isn't.
This whole thing feels like its purpose is to create discord between dems and reps
Not to create a discord, to show where a disconnect exists.
I'd be more interested in ranking the cities by how over/under-estimated these cities are.
This is interesting! With a few exceptions (e.g., Dallas) where both hit it spot on, Democrats are underestimating crime and republicans are over estimating crime. I'd love to see if there's a correlation between news sources likely consumed vs. this data. % of violent crime stories on CNN vs. FoxNews or something like that?
No wonder republicans love guns so much, they’re afraid of their own shadows and think every city is St Louis
It looks like the ones who actually live there tend to feel most safe
These stats come up frequently but I feel violent crime rates don't give you the full picture about how safe a city is.
I have lived in NYC and San Francisco and definitely feel far more unsafe in SF despite them having comparable levels of violent crime. For example, San Francisco has very high property crime rates and you'll see quite a lot of sketchy people on the streets. These aren't reflected in the violent crime rates but still require you to be much more alert and on edge than you would in say downtown Manhattan, and these contribute to feelings of unsafety
Republicans fear if NYC is always so funny to me. It’s like one of the greatest proofs that they don’t live in reality. I spend a decent amount of time there and I’ve never felt Unsafe once, even walking home drunk at 3am in Brooklyn
So across the board *Dems overestimate* the safety of urban areas and *Rep underestimate* it with the remarkable exception of Dallas and even Miami..
What I want to see now is the suburban and rural area version of this.
Dems think urban areas are safer than Reps. Thats it.
You can't really over/under-estimate using this info. If the survey asked "what do you think the crime rate in Chicago is?" and the average dem said 500 per 100k, then you can say that they are underestimated.
No, its not "thats it"... they were both off.
Did you read my comment and each percentage in the chart correctly? The GREY is the actual data. The two others are perceptions of those places.
This chart clearly shows Dems OVERestimated safety and Reps UNDERestimated it apart from the exception of Dallas and Miami that I mentioned where their perceptions matched the data.
I don't think the average American would give you a "per 100k" answer at any point.
Completely unsurprised.
Also the amount of times I was told by certain folks that "BLM/antifa destroyed your city" during 2020 was hilarious (there was like a knocked over trash can and a broken window)
Wow, this makes a lot of sense. I’m just now realizing that much of what republicans believe is fear-based. They aren’t evil, they are afraid.
Analysis:
Republican perception of city safety has almost zero correlation with violent crime per 100k
Republican perception of city safety is highly correlated with its political reputation
Democrats are pretty good at guaging city safety.
EDIT:
Correlation coefficient between city violent crime rate per 100k and safety perception
Democrats 0.470
Republicans 0.186
Calculation below
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jI3SlSiSAW2l17equKnSY3mM5BPH8Mora9pJdlyTHt8/edit?usp=sharing
Not even close. The Republican sense is usually low by 30% or so and Democrats are 32% high or so.
How do you even remotely get that Republicans feeling safe are inaccurate but Democrats are even remotely accurate?
Republican safety perception a very small correlation to violent crime ranking
Democrat safety perception has a much higher correlation to violent crime ranking
I punched the city rankings and safety perceptions into excel:
Democrats have a correlation coefficient of .470
Republicans have a correlation coefficient of .186
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jI3SlSiSAW2l17equKnSY3mM5BPH8Mora9pJdlyTHt8/edit?usp=sharing
Ranking? Ranking them from 1 to 15 isn't even remotely how you would correlate it. Detroit is almost twice as dangerous as Houston, and Houston is pretty much on par with Philadelphia. Minneapolis and Chicago are pretty much the same.
So ranking them means nothing when the difference is pretty much over 3x from top to bottom, but some are less than literally .02% different.
Perception of safety would have to correlate to actual safety. Although this is purely violent crimes so perception is not directly related anyways. Being mugged isn't always a violent crime (especially considering different states define it differently), so the numbers are different anyways. This makes this chart pretty much useless except to say that Neither Democrats Nor Republicans are good at estimating City Safety based on purely Violent Crime data.
If you use the violent crime rate, the correlation becomes
Dem -0.656
Rep -0.322
Less dramatically different, but Dems are still very meaningfully better at guaging actual safer/less safe cities.
I agree that violent crime rate isn't a perfect guage, but likely one of the best.
Again, Violent Crimes are not the only thing that make people feel safe or not. Regular, non-violent crimes like mugging and theft can drastically change peoples perceptions of safety.
The most dangerous place is not some major city, it is smaller towns, where someone might kill another once every few years, but statistically, that makes them extremely unsafe when it is only a couple thousand people there. But because the town might have massively lower theft and other non-violent crimes, it can Appear much safer and actually Be safer, just not for chances of being murdered.
Yep, Republicans are notoriously poor at recognizing reality like crime trends and rates. Being fearful is key to their ideology.
While underestimating crime is more common in supporters of the Democratic Party, they are significantly closer to the reality of those numbers on average.
Violent Crime is not the only way something is deemed safe or not. 'Softer' crimes can make a place Feel more dangerous.
Think of it this way, the deadliest place in the US isn't some major city, it is some small town or County with so few people, that a single murder will rocket it up to massive amounts. That is why most of the FBI statistics specifically only look at cities of 250k or higher. Because smaller numbers screw things up. But people would likely say someplace with only 500 people living in it, no muggings, no major thefts, but a single murder (making it much higher than Detroit in statistics that year) much safer than a large city with 0 murders (never happens but it is possible), but loads of muggings and thefts that are not defined as 'violent' crime.
interesting data, could have been presented better in more than a few ways. I do like the style tho.
The attempt to normalize crime on reddit because of political reasons is disgusting. No society should have to put up with even 10% of what is going on in US cities. You think Tokyo or Zurich is like this?
US cities have all dramatically lowered crime over the past 40 years
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In the graph on the far left (actual crime), longer bars effectively mean "less safe", whereas in the other three graphs longer bars mean "we think it is more safe" -- is that right?