Short answer: if you're interested in how safe you are walking down the street or operating a business, no, probably not. Murder rates are higher in US cities -- again, it's a few neighborhoods in a few cities driving those numbers up in the US -- but murderers usually know their victims. Your house is far more likely to be robbed in a European city than in an American one. Your business is far more likely to be robbed in London than in New York City, and even Chicago and LA are less likely to involve a business robbery than the capitol of the UK.
Only Chicago ranks among the worst European cities -- and below both Paris and London -- for how likely you are to be robbed on the street. Vehicle theft is more likely in Chicago and LA than in Europe, but on the other hand, Americans are more likely to own a vehicle to steal.
The set doesn't include other offenses we might care about: assault, battery, violent sexual assault or rape. However, the picture that comes out overall is not the one you normally get from the press. If you compared the rural US, which has violent crime rates around half of our city average (i.e. not our very worst cities like Chicago), the safety of Americans would be even more stark.
3 comments:
Yup. Happy to report that I have been packing for lots of years and have NEVER had occasion to even think about pulling the weapon. Of course, 80++% of that time has been in the 'burbs,' but time in the Big City's sketchy areas has also been very quiet.
That's good to know. I also find the United States quite safe to walk around, but to some degree that is overdetermined.
For the benefit of others- I had to click the link to the archive, and then do a captcha, and then it froze. I cam back, clicked the link here again, and it bypassed the captcha and took me to the archived article successfully.
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