An innocent woman was set on fire and before the proverbial flames were even extinguished, you write a smug “hot take” (awful euphemism aside) comparing ridership to the number of deaths. Maybe spend less time on social media trying to counter every right-wing bad faith take and consider some restraint, empathy, and context?
Your larger picture of the crime statistics misses the point of such an ultra-violent crime.
It is indeed like the very opposite of understanding Nate's role, isn't it... he brings cool rational data driven balance to the emotional driven anecdote commentary and reporting.
Balance - since there's way too much Anectdote driven reaction - not that much data driven (we all are as humans I recognize bad at being really data driven, best we can do is balance, personally I think we need more Silver to off-set Clickbaitism and Internnet Drama llamaism.
The point of terrorism is to instill terror out of proportion to the actual likelihood of the event befalling you.
Ultra violent events are extremely traumatizing of course, but people who use them to fan the flames of terror beyond actual statistical reality are not acting in the interest of rational society.
They are either advancing terror as a cause, or are tools of those who lead down that path.
Crime rates are still elevated compared to 2019. There may be local decline, by which I mean post-Covid, but the pandemic remains the line of demarcation between a much less violent past and a more violent present.
You know, I missed that whole thing, about crime rising so high during the pandemic. Hiding out on the farm, not reading news as much? Maybe, or maybe this is news only coming out now. As much as the news can be trusted, which isn't much, perhaps. The crime stats are apparently awful from the FBI, from what I read.
Genuinely curious, because I take the subway everyday in NYC and know exactly what’s up.
Do you seriously think crime statistics are even worth mentioning here? You’re a very smart dude. As someone who sees at least 20 different crimes committed and reported almost each day, I’d say maybe at most 1 or 2 of them are dealt with.
If you take the number or crimes that are committed and not reported, it would blow your mind. It’s almost like a repeat of what the gov narrative is vs reality when in regards of inflation. People like you can tell us there’s no inflation but we’re don’t dumb.
Any person can see just how f’d up every subway is in NYC and the people on it doing it, and you people then try and gaslight us and say it’s not bad.
For every person like you, there’s a person like me who surprisingly is not subject to, nor an observer of constant crime and “deterioration”despite my 14+ subway trips per week, including trips to/through three boroughs.
That doesn’t include my 8+ bus trips per week, for which my only complaint is the frequency of service and congestion due to too many cars.
In fact, the only “incident” we experienced in the last six months was when a MAGA yelled at/made fun of (?) my daughter for wearing glasses while espousing the virtues of Trump.
But I am wise enough to know my own lived experience is not translatable to every other person’s. I hope your own experiences improve.
You are on a different subway than me. I see crime daily, and I'm just taking the 6 train in Manhattan from one safe neighborhood to another during rush hour. The crime I see is mainly nonviolent, but I have seen three felony assaults in the last year. I tried to report one at the Union Square Precinct but was discouraged by the police from filing a report.
This stands in stark contrast from 1999 (when I moved to the city) to 2019 when I saw one felony assault in the entire 20-year period.
A young female officer started taking my report and then an older male officer came over and told her to stop taking my report and that he would just “take note of it.” I told him I would like to continue to file my report and he gave me the precinct’s phone number and told me to call it in. I told him that I had always been able to file in person before and he told me that the new process was to phone it in or file it on the internet. Rather than continue, I just left the precinct.
Yeah, the crime rate is very high, looks like, but the police can't/won't do anything about it in the leftwing political environment, so they don't allow reporting crime unless it's spectacular.
Overwhelmingly what I see is (1) Misdemeanor Assault, (2) Aggressive Panhandling, and (3) Fare Evasion. These are all crimes under the NY Penal Code. It is reasonable to argue whether or not they should be enforced, but the post pandemic incidence of these is way up.
Since you are a man you probably don't notice all the episodes of fingering and feeling up women that happen. Remember it too well from Chicago subways -----
Of course we did white flight as soon as we could. White Flight happens because people aren't damn fools.
For what it's worth, I've bought weekly passes that don't seem to register, and the staff will just tell me to use the emergency exit. I'm sure you'd see that and count it as fare evasion.
Do you really see daily assaults and aggressive panhandling? Like 20 a day?
I’m not the OP. Those are just the crimes I see and I don’t see “20/day” like they do.
That said, I don’t think it’s *that* crazy of a claim for one person to say they that many crimes. There are entire bus routes where no one pays the fare and that’s fare evasion every time someone gets on.
Again, it’s a choice for law enforcement as to whether or not they want to go after these crimes, but they are crimes.
NYC is a joke. The rich who reside in city live lives of ultra luxury and are fine with covering up crime statistics less they face the fact their city is fatally and financially flawed.
Please don't even try to defend what's going on with official statistics. The major cities actually admit that they did not submit full numbers; and that's without counting the number of crimes that are unreported because 1. nothing will happen to the perpetrator who'll be released without bail within 24 hours; and 2. if the perpetrator has any idea who reported it, there will be swift and drastic retaliation.
Trump’s cabinet nominees way more crime-ridden than the typical subway rider in NYC, SF or any other city that has one. Gaetz, Hegseth, RFK, Jr. … they are not sending their best.
To borrow from @ken1lutheran, “don’t even try to defend what is going on with official statistics.” But if you are near any of them (especially if you are a woman), be very careful. All gross sex pests, among other disqualifying characteristics for their proposed roles.
Crime rates, including the homicide rate, are still elevated now compared to 2019. The pandemic is the bright line between the way that the country used to be and the way it is now, and the present has more crime and more violence.
If Bragg doesn't go after white men who didn't do anything criminal, he just doesn't get any attention at all, and he knows it. That man lives for media attention.
My sense of security is shaken when store shelves are locked up, fare evasion is ignored, and senior officials in municipal government appear to sympathize more with perpetrators than victims.
I lived in Manhattan in the 1970's and 1980's when it was much more dangerous, by the statistics. But it feels less safe today.
I have been to downtown Atlanta for work many many times in the past 15 years, let’s say once a quarter.
Around 2021-2022 suddenly there were passed out junkies in the middle of the sidewalk in the core downtown, laying there like dead bodies. You would encounter several a day. The number of homeless people hassling you maybe tripled, and the Walgreens went from a normal functional place, to a place with one or two security guards with assault rifles, a group of panhandlers camped out front hassling every person going inside, and half of everything inside locked up and giant lines with non-functional clerks.
I am sure if you looked up “crime” figures someone would tell you “crime” was down. But it was obviously, and felt wildly, less safe.
Yeah, trouble is Nate that the subway may well be safe and you're more likely to be struck by lightning, but.... when I take the bus in my town between here and the nearby cities, even though I've had some bad experiences, I am nowhere near risking being murdered by being set on fire.
I do sympathise, but "only one person in the year was murdered by a guy setting them on fire in the station!" is one person too many for most of us.
In “Triumph of the City” (2011), Howard Glaeser noted that the death rate for Manhattanites aged 25-34 is 60% lower than for that age group in the country as a whole.
There may be more high profile crimes in New York City than in other places simply because there are more people, and high profile crime in New York is more likely to make the news elsewhere because of 1) the high media concentration in New York, and 2) right-leaning news sources have an ages-old obsession with crime in cities, especially New York.
That said, New York is a far less dangerous place than most cities, with most of that 60% difference (admittedly for one slice of the population) due to much lower traffic violence, gun violence, and suicide death rates in New York. Yes, yesterday’s crime was horrendous, but I don’t want to be burned alive on a train or run over by a speeding driver: avoidable, premature death is all pretty terrible.
It’s reasonable to ask whether New York is as safe as it was 10-15 years ago, but using a single terrible story to imply that New York is a dangerous place compared to others is a mistake.
This is because New York has much better trauma centers than any other big city. On the entire South Side of Chicago there is one trauma center (U of Chicago). In the New York Health and Hospitals system even hospitals that are not particularly noteworthy are Tier 1 Trauma Centers. When you add private systems like Columbia, Cornell, Northwell, Sinai, Maimonides, it’s just not a fair comparison. If you want to survive a stabbing or a gunshot wound, you are better off being in New York than any other place in the world.
Nate, 2024-12-06: "This is part 2 of our 3-part autopsy on Kamala Harris’s campaign . . . We’ll pick up with Part III next week".
Part 3 has yet to be posted. Nate's subsequent posts have been about Juan Soto and Daylight Savings Time, as well as not one but two posts about the Biden age coverup (which, though the topic runs tangentially to the autopsy, is not based on the Pod Save America podcast transcript).
Are we going to get a part 3, Nate? Could you at least acknowledge this, the third or fourth comment I've posted asking this same question? I apologize if my tone is slightly less than civil, but I'm a paying subscriber and don't appreciate my question being treated as white noise. That's fine and fair on a free-to-read blog, but charging money makes it feel a lot different.
Most of the people commenting on Nate Silver's blog are Nate Silver fans and most Patriots season ticket holders are Pats fans! The internet is huge, my dude. If you're not a fan, that's cool. You're not obligated to comment on everything you don't like.
The whole thing damningly undermines the dem's claims to be the party of honest dealers, and there needs to be much more feet being held to fire if politicians of ANY party are going to worry about getting hurt at the polls for trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the public.
Nate - the felony assault rate (both inside and outside the subway) has been climbing steadily HIGHER since 2010. So, yes, NYC is a "relatively safe" city, but the perception of risk for those who live there is higher because many moved there expecting lower than 2010 levels instead of higher (which is what they've gotten). So you have people who moved there expecting Bloomberg crime levels (ridiculously low), and instead, they've gotten Giuliani levels (pretty low).
The murder rate is lower, but there's a reasonable argument that murder is a better measure of trauma health care than it is of "safety" (Malcolm Gladwell did a piece on this).
Cities suck if you are trying to raise a family. With the internet, nobody has to live in a city. And the ratio of decent, normal, people to the wild childs and the human derelicts keeps shifting unfavorably. And you catch the covid and the colds easier in crowded places. The ancient curse of the city, the plague. Cities are preternaturally unhealthy compared to the countryside.
Canada has less than twice as many murders per year as NYC. On the other hand, Canada has a population of 40 million to NYC's 8 million. Seems to me that if you consider the number of murders "this year" as being normal, you've got a problem.
The rest of the stats are junk. There's just too many unreported crimes. I went to the drug store yesterday (admittedly not in NYC) and discovered that the safety razors I wanted were under lock and key. Everything in that section was. Apparently the thieves were coming in with a garbage bag and emptying the entire section. I asked if they called the police and got an eye roll. So no.
I'm a lifelong NYC resident and love the city. A statistical quibble. Shouldn't you compare the annual number of murders in the subway to the number of riders, not the number of rides? So it's not five or ten compared to a billion rides but compared to, say, three million riders.
Well don't you think someone who takes the subway daily should count more than a tourist who takes it five times in a year? Of course rides is the better metric
Take the total ridership in a year and divide by 365 to get the average number of riders per day. He compared it to being struck by lightening, a stat that is expressed as annual.
What I care about for lightning is the average frequency of a strike relative to... not my human existence as an individual person, but how frequently I go outdoors. If I'm an average person who goes out of doors an average amount, the average number of strikes per year will give me a reasonable measure.
So for the subway, I think the analogue is I care about whether the average ride in a given year (average person wtih average outdoor habits) will yield a murder (get struck by lightning).
But the more DIRECT comparison is average rider, I think you're right. Taking it by ride, though, is a little bit like conditioning on "the average time you go outside, what's the probability you get struck," which if the data existed is more what I think I would want to know for whether I should go outside or spend another hour trawling Silver Bulletin comments.
Also, people spend a limited amount of their time on the subway, so it’s misleading to compare that rate to rates based upon geographical areas where people spend ALL of their time. Perhaps comparing it to something like deaths from plane crashes compared to total number of passengers.
As a reminder, there's two ways of measuring crime. The FBI tabulates police reports. In addition the government also surveys the country asking people if they've been the victim of a crime.
Usually those two measures track fairly closely. But in 2022 they showed a massive divergence, with the police reports showing a drop in crime while the survey showed a massive increase.
That picture isn't consistent with falling crime rates, it's consistent with people becoming crime victims and not reporting it to the police.
Ha, it's also consistent with people trying to report it to the police and the police refusing to bother with it. After one experience like that, no one reports.
I live part of the year in Orlando and part on the Upper West Side. Recently a fellow tenant (an 80 year old woman) approached me in the parking garage of my Orlando building. “How can you stand to live in New York. There is so much crime and the subway is not safe.” A couple of things occurred to me. First the per capita homicide rate in Orlando is much higher than Manhattan. Second, I know this ladies habits well. She drives to dinner every night and always has at least two glasses of wine. So I wondered… where am I safer: on the crime ridden C train or out on 1-4 with an 80 year old who is probably above the limit? I nodded nicely and pretended I hadn’t heard the question. “Happy Holidays!”
She's unlikely to be above the legal limit if she had two glasses of wine with dinner, over the course of a couple hours. She's probably at an 0.02 - 0.04 which is fine to drive.
I simply don't care what suburban & rural dwellers say about life in cities. They're ignorant of the real situation on the ground, and they're largely talking to other people who are also ignorant of the real situation on the ground. So the blind leading the blind, really.
We've got plenty of people in my city already. Suburbanites gonna stay away? Don't threaten me with a good time.
Big cities are seeing a decline in population as people vote with their feet. I don't think there's a single big city mayor/administration that isn't worried about declining tax revenues.
Thank you for this article. I am so tired of the anti-city narrative that overwhelms the media and politics today. People find it difficult to appreciate the scale of major cities and the size of the populations. Yes, some statistics are unreliable but all homicides get reported; death statistics are maybe the most reliable social statistics across regions, countries and centuries. Some of the rural numbers are truly awful.
An innocent woman was set on fire and before the proverbial flames were even extinguished, you write a smug “hot take” (awful euphemism aside) comparing ridership to the number of deaths. Maybe spend less time on social media trying to counter every right-wing bad faith take and consider some restraint, empathy, and context?
Your larger picture of the crime statistics misses the point of such an ultra-violent crime.
Does ultra violent crime make people ultra more dead?
If anecdote is all it takes, things have been great ever since Charles Manson was locked up, right?
It is indeed like the very opposite of understanding Nate's role, isn't it... he brings cool rational data driven balance to the emotional driven anecdote commentary and reporting.
Balance - since there's way too much Anectdote driven reaction - not that much data driven (we all are as humans I recognize bad at being really data driven, best we can do is balance, personally I think we need more Silver to off-set Clickbaitism and Internnet Drama llamaism.
Nate is a rational data driven person - there is going to be more than enough Very Dramatic and Emotional Internet comment on that murder.
However drama and emotion are lizard brain mob responses - human enough but we need more rational inputs to balance.
Nate here provides rational balance.
Yes.
The point of terrorism is to instill terror out of proportion to the actual likelihood of the event befalling you.
Ultra violent events are extremely traumatizing of course, but people who use them to fan the flames of terror beyond actual statistical reality are not acting in the interest of rational society.
They are either advancing terror as a cause, or are tools of those who lead down that path.
Or just homicidal maniacs --- I would guess that Guatamalan illegal was probably simply that.
Crime rates are still elevated compared to 2019. There may be local decline, by which I mean post-Covid, but the pandemic remains the line of demarcation between a much less violent past and a more violent present.
You know, I missed that whole thing, about crime rising so high during the pandemic. Hiding out on the farm, not reading news as much? Maybe, or maybe this is news only coming out now. As much as the news can be trusted, which isn't much, perhaps. The crime stats are apparently awful from the FBI, from what I read.
Not the Beethoven!
Genuinely curious, because I take the subway everyday in NYC and know exactly what’s up.
Do you seriously think crime statistics are even worth mentioning here? You’re a very smart dude. As someone who sees at least 20 different crimes committed and reported almost each day, I’d say maybe at most 1 or 2 of them are dealt with.
If you take the number or crimes that are committed and not reported, it would blow your mind. It’s almost like a repeat of what the gov narrative is vs reality when in regards of inflation. People like you can tell us there’s no inflation but we’re don’t dumb.
Any person can see just how f’d up every subway is in NYC and the people on it doing it, and you people then try and gaslight us and say it’s not bad.
For every person like you, there’s a person like me who surprisingly is not subject to, nor an observer of constant crime and “deterioration”despite my 14+ subway trips per week, including trips to/through three boroughs.
That doesn’t include my 8+ bus trips per week, for which my only complaint is the frequency of service and congestion due to too many cars.
In fact, the only “incident” we experienced in the last six months was when a MAGA yelled at/made fun of (?) my daughter for wearing glasses while espousing the virtues of Trump.
But I am wise enough to know my own lived experience is not translatable to every other person’s. I hope your own experiences improve.
You are on a different subway than me. I see crime daily, and I'm just taking the 6 train in Manhattan from one safe neighborhood to another during rush hour. The crime I see is mainly nonviolent, but I have seen three felony assaults in the last year. I tried to report one at the Union Square Precinct but was discouraged by the police from filing a report.
This stands in stark contrast from 1999 (when I moved to the city) to 2019 when I saw one felony assault in the entire 20-year period.
Discouraged how?
A young female officer started taking my report and then an older male officer came over and told her to stop taking my report and that he would just “take note of it.” I told him I would like to continue to file my report and he gave me the precinct’s phone number and told me to call it in. I told him that I had always been able to file in person before and he told me that the new process was to phone it in or file it on the internet. Rather than continue, I just left the precinct.
Yeah, the crime rate is very high, looks like, but the police can't/won't do anything about it in the leftwing political environment, so they don't allow reporting crime unless it's spectacular.
That is upsetting :(
Ride the A much?
Almost every day for 20 years.
What 20 crimes do you see?
Overwhelmingly what I see is (1) Misdemeanor Assault, (2) Aggressive Panhandling, and (3) Fare Evasion. These are all crimes under the NY Penal Code. It is reasonable to argue whether or not they should be enforced, but the post pandemic incidence of these is way up.
Since you are a man you probably don't notice all the episodes of fingering and feeling up women that happen. Remember it too well from Chicago subways -----
Of course we did white flight as soon as we could. White Flight happens because people aren't damn fools.
You see that 20 times a day?
For what it's worth, I've bought weekly passes that don't seem to register, and the staff will just tell me to use the emergency exit. I'm sure you'd see that and count it as fare evasion.
Do you really see daily assaults and aggressive panhandling? Like 20 a day?
I’m not the OP. Those are just the crimes I see and I don’t see “20/day” like they do.
That said, I don’t think it’s *that* crazy of a claim for one person to say they that many crimes. There are entire bus routes where no one pays the fare and that’s fare evasion every time someone gets on.
Again, it’s a choice for law enforcement as to whether or not they want to go after these crimes, but they are crimes.
We need to go after the little crimes... it's important
Yeah, broken windows policing. It's the best thing that works, although going after the assaults wouldn't hurt!
NYC is a joke. The rich who reside in city live lives of ultra luxury and are fine with covering up crime statistics less they face the fact their city is fatally and financially flawed.
911 is a Joke!!
So you personally see 20 crimes a day on the subway? Please enumerate.
You have maybe the whiniest comments section I’ve ever seen of any writer or creator, ever
I think Seth Meyer's on youtube are also pretty fun.
Please don't even try to defend what's going on with official statistics. The major cities actually admit that they did not submit full numbers; and that's without counting the number of crimes that are unreported because 1. nothing will happen to the perpetrator who'll be released without bail within 24 hours; and 2. if the perpetrator has any idea who reported it, there will be swift and drastic retaliation.
Alvin Bragg's too busy trying to nail Donald Trump on some imaginary charge with the active cooperation of Judge Merchan.
Trump’s cabinet nominees way more crime-ridden than the typical subway rider in NYC, SF or any other city that has one. Gaetz, Hegseth, RFK, Jr. … they are not sending their best.
None of those people are crime-ridden. I don't think Gaetz or Hegseth has ever even been charged.
To borrow from @ken1lutheran, “don’t even try to defend what is going on with official statistics.” But if you are near any of them (especially if you are a woman), be very careful. All gross sex pests, among other disqualifying characteristics for their proposed roles.
I don't believe any of that. The accusations are not credible.
It is kind of like the unreported/uncharged crime on the subway … believe what you want to believe.
Crime rates, including the homicide rate, are still elevated now compared to 2019. The pandemic is the bright line between the way that the country used to be and the way it is now, and the present has more crime and more violence.
Don’t forget about the Trumpian sex pests … they are a big part of the crime wave as well. Some of them heading to the Cabinet now!
The jury nailed Trump, not Bragg or Merchan. That's the way the system works. They heard the evidence, judged credibility, and convicted him. Simple.
On crimes that nobody can really define.
If Bragg doesn't go after white men who didn't do anything criminal, he just doesn't get any attention at all, and he knows it. That man lives for media attention.
My sense of security is shaken when store shelves are locked up, fare evasion is ignored, and senior officials in municipal government appear to sympathize more with perpetrators than victims.
I lived in Manhattan in the 1970's and 1980's when it was much more dangerous, by the statistics. But it feels less safe today.
Ding Ding Ding.
I have been to downtown Atlanta for work many many times in the past 15 years, let’s say once a quarter.
Around 2021-2022 suddenly there were passed out junkies in the middle of the sidewalk in the core downtown, laying there like dead bodies. You would encounter several a day. The number of homeless people hassling you maybe tripled, and the Walgreens went from a normal functional place, to a place with one or two security guards with assault rifles, a group of panhandlers camped out front hassling every person going inside, and half of everything inside locked up and giant lines with non-functional clerks.
I am sure if you looked up “crime” figures someone would tell you “crime” was down. But it was obviously, and felt wildly, less safe.
Did anyone bang the passed-out junkies?
?
Just curious if you saw that
Well said.
Yeah, trouble is Nate that the subway may well be safe and you're more likely to be struck by lightning, but.... when I take the bus in my town between here and the nearby cities, even though I've had some bad experiences, I am nowhere near risking being murdered by being set on fire.
I do sympathise, but "only one person in the year was murdered by a guy setting them on fire in the station!" is one person too many for most of us.
In “Triumph of the City” (2011), Howard Glaeser noted that the death rate for Manhattanites aged 25-34 is 60% lower than for that age group in the country as a whole.
There may be more high profile crimes in New York City than in other places simply because there are more people, and high profile crime in New York is more likely to make the news elsewhere because of 1) the high media concentration in New York, and 2) right-leaning news sources have an ages-old obsession with crime in cities, especially New York.
That said, New York is a far less dangerous place than most cities, with most of that 60% difference (admittedly for one slice of the population) due to much lower traffic violence, gun violence, and suicide death rates in New York. Yes, yesterday’s crime was horrendous, but I don’t want to be burned alive on a train or run over by a speeding driver: avoidable, premature death is all pretty terrible.
It’s reasonable to ask whether New York is as safe as it was 10-15 years ago, but using a single terrible story to imply that New York is a dangerous place compared to others is a mistake.
This is because New York has much better trauma centers than any other big city. On the entire South Side of Chicago there is one trauma center (U of Chicago). In the New York Health and Hospitals system even hospitals that are not particularly noteworthy are Tier 1 Trauma Centers. When you add private systems like Columbia, Cornell, Northwell, Sinai, Maimonides, it’s just not a fair comparison. If you want to survive a stabbing or a gunshot wound, you are better off being in New York than any other place in the world.
Well: maybe better to be in Baltimore where shock-trauma medicine started and both U. Maryland and Hopkins do the best and the most.
And considering it's Baltimore, they have lots and lots of practice ------
Thank God there's no subway, at least.
What? The Baltimore Subway ends at Johns Hopkins: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johns_Hopkins_Hospital_station
Nate, 2024-12-06: "This is part 2 of our 3-part autopsy on Kamala Harris’s campaign . . . We’ll pick up with Part III next week".
Part 3 has yet to be posted. Nate's subsequent posts have been about Juan Soto and Daylight Savings Time, as well as not one but two posts about the Biden age coverup (which, though the topic runs tangentially to the autopsy, is not based on the Pod Save America podcast transcript).
Are we going to get a part 3, Nate? Could you at least acknowledge this, the third or fourth comment I've posted asking this same question? I apologize if my tone is slightly less than civil, but I'm a paying subscriber and don't appreciate my question being treated as white noise. That's fine and fair on a free-to-read blog, but charging money makes it feel a lot different.
I agree. Not a Nate Silver fan like most of the rest of the people in these comments.
Most of the people commenting on Nate Silver's blog are Nate Silver fans and most Patriots season ticket holders are Pats fans! The internet is huge, my dude. If you're not a fan, that's cool. You're not obligated to comment on everything you don't like.
Huh? Two posts on the Biden age coverup? Where?
Give the man a magnifying-glass logo, JC's playing fact checker today!
Plaudits to you.
Hehe aww thanks. I don't think we can get enough posts on the Biden age coverup - I'd love to see another
Copy that!
The whole thing damningly undermines the dem's claims to be the party of honest dealers, and there needs to be much more feet being held to fire if politicians of ANY party are going to worry about getting hurt at the polls for trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the public.
Yes that's for sure. I'm glad the media is starting to pay more attention
Yeah I agree. Whole lot of filler since Part 2.
I only see one post on the Biden age coverup, on Dec 20.
I like subways without Guatemalan illegals burning people to death.
I thought illegals never committed crimes! The mainstream media says so!
Yeah, it doesn't seem too much to ask of government to stop that.
It’s much better when the burning is done by American citizens
Nate - the felony assault rate (both inside and outside the subway) has been climbing steadily HIGHER since 2010. So, yes, NYC is a "relatively safe" city, but the perception of risk for those who live there is higher because many moved there expecting lower than 2010 levels instead of higher (which is what they've gotten). So you have people who moved there expecting Bloomberg crime levels (ridiculously low), and instead, they've gotten Giuliani levels (pretty low).
The murder rate is lower, but there's a reasonable argument that murder is a better measure of trauma health care than it is of "safety" (Malcolm Gladwell did a piece on this).
Cities suck if you are trying to raise a family. With the internet, nobody has to live in a city. And the ratio of decent, normal, people to the wild childs and the human derelicts keeps shifting unfavorably. And you catch the covid and the colds easier in crowded places. The ancient curse of the city, the plague. Cities are preternaturally unhealthy compared to the countryside.
Ok boomer
That is Gen X erasure and I want to register a strong complaint! The oldest of us are getting near old age pensioner status!
Near, nothing; I've about used mine up.
Canada has less than twice as many murders per year as NYC. On the other hand, Canada has a population of 40 million to NYC's 8 million. Seems to me that if you consider the number of murders "this year" as being normal, you've got a problem.
The rest of the stats are junk. There's just too many unreported crimes. I went to the drug store yesterday (admittedly not in NYC) and discovered that the safety razors I wanted were under lock and key. Everything in that section was. Apparently the thieves were coming in with a garbage bag and emptying the entire section. I asked if they called the police and got an eye roll. So no.
When Trump puts Canada in with the rest of our states, that will lower the crime stats, and everyone will be happier.
And Greenland! When we get them, (some 60,000 people in the whole icy land mass) American crime stats will just about disappear.
I'm a lifelong NYC resident and love the city. A statistical quibble. Shouldn't you compare the annual number of murders in the subway to the number of riders, not the number of rides? So it's not five or ten compared to a billion rides but compared to, say, three million riders.
Kind of depends on what you are trying to calculate.
Risk per ride is a pretty reasonable baseline.
Risk per rider is based on personal ride frequency, and if you get that detailed probably depends more on time of day and specific locations.
Well don't you think someone who takes the subway daily should count more than a tourist who takes it five times in a year? Of course rides is the better metric
Take the total ridership in a year and divide by 365 to get the average number of riders per day. He compared it to being struck by lightening, a stat that is expressed as annual.
Please more statistical quibbles.
I think I am with CJ but open to being swayed.
What I care about for lightning is the average frequency of a strike relative to... not my human existence as an individual person, but how frequently I go outdoors. If I'm an average person who goes out of doors an average amount, the average number of strikes per year will give me a reasonable measure.
So for the subway, I think the analogue is I care about whether the average ride in a given year (average person wtih average outdoor habits) will yield a murder (get struck by lightning).
But the more DIRECT comparison is average rider, I think you're right. Taking it by ride, though, is a little bit like conditioning on "the average time you go outside, what's the probability you get struck," which if the data existed is more what I think I would want to know for whether I should go outside or spend another hour trawling Silver Bulletin comments.
Also, people spend a limited amount of their time on the subway, so it’s misleading to compare that rate to rates based upon geographical areas where people spend ALL of their time. Perhaps comparing it to something like deaths from plane crashes compared to total number of passengers.
As a reminder, there's two ways of measuring crime. The FBI tabulates police reports. In addition the government also surveys the country asking people if they've been the victim of a crime.
Usually those two measures track fairly closely. But in 2022 they showed a massive divergence, with the police reports showing a drop in crime while the survey showed a massive increase.
That picture isn't consistent with falling crime rates, it's consistent with people becoming crime victims and not reporting it to the police.
Ha, it's also consistent with people trying to report it to the police and the police refusing to bother with it. After one experience like that, no one reports.
I live part of the year in Orlando and part on the Upper West Side. Recently a fellow tenant (an 80 year old woman) approached me in the parking garage of my Orlando building. “How can you stand to live in New York. There is so much crime and the subway is not safe.” A couple of things occurred to me. First the per capita homicide rate in Orlando is much higher than Manhattan. Second, I know this ladies habits well. She drives to dinner every night and always has at least two glasses of wine. So I wondered… where am I safer: on the crime ridden C train or out on 1-4 with an 80 year old who is probably above the limit? I nodded nicely and pretended I hadn’t heard the question. “Happy Holidays!”
She's unlikely to be above the legal limit if she had two glasses of wine with dinner, over the course of a couple hours. She's probably at an 0.02 - 0.04 which is fine to drive.
I simply don't care what suburban & rural dwellers say about life in cities. They're ignorant of the real situation on the ground, and they're largely talking to other people who are also ignorant of the real situation on the ground. So the blind leading the blind, really.
We've got plenty of people in my city already. Suburbanites gonna stay away? Don't threaten me with a good time.
Big cities are seeing a decline in population as people vote with their feet. I don't think there's a single big city mayor/administration that isn't worried about declining tax revenues.
Thank you for this article. I am so tired of the anti-city narrative that overwhelms the media and politics today. People find it difficult to appreciate the scale of major cities and the size of the populations. Yes, some statistics are unreliable but all homicides get reported; death statistics are maybe the most reliable social statistics across regions, countries and centuries. Some of the rural numbers are truly awful.