Aripyanfar wrote:
By square mile it STILL comes out that cities are safer than country areas.
I find that hard to believe. Do you have data to back this up? The difference in population density can often be extreme (100-1000 times more dense) between large cities and rural areas. For your claim to be true, you'd have to have a per-capita difference greater than the density difference. So not just "a few times more", but hundreds of times higher per-capita crime rates.
I'm willing to accept that it's possible, but I'd need something more than you just saying that it's so.
Quote:
So you are walking down a city block at night... how likely are you to be one of the 4000 that year?
Not very. But remember we're talking about relative values that are all in the "very unlikely" range anyway. The point is that you are more likely than you might be walking (or as Tirith pointed out, driving) home late at night in a more rural area. And the density bit doesn't matter. Most of the population density in an urban setting is because housing is so tightly packed (or goes up more than out). The fact that there are 10,000 people tucked away in their beds in their homes within the square mile area you are walking through instead of 10 people doesn't make you safer in any way at all.
This kinda reminds me of the argument we had on this forum about travel safety, where I pointed out that while "deaths per passenger mile" may be a valid measurement from an accounting (or insurance) point of view, it's not from a "how likely am *I* to die while traveling from point A to point B)?". The idea that my odds of dying in a crash change based purely on the number of other passengers in the same vehicle with me is pretty absurd.
And the idea that your odds of being mugged change based on how many people live in the apartment buildings you're walking by is equally absurd. What matters is how many crimes of a given type occur in the area you are in, and how exposed you are (meaning how much are you standing out based on your behavior). If you're the one lone guy walking down a stretch of street when a gang decides to mug the next guy who walks by, all those other people not walking down the street but living nearby don't matter. And if you have a schedule which requires you to be more likely to be in that situation, the statistics of the "per mile" crimes outweighs the fact that so many people not in that situation are safe. You're the antelope on the outside of the herd, and the fact that you're crossing a river with more total crocodiles in it kinda matters more than the size of the herd.