Since 2020, the United States has experienced a wave of deadly violence and New York is not spared. We also remember that the current mayor of the city, Eric Adams, a former police officer, was elected in November 2021 on a program to fight against insecurity. However, even if the Big Apple is now much more dangerous than before the health crisis, we are still safer there than almost anywhere else in the United States, argues columnist Justin Fox on the site of Bloomberg, based on statistics from the FBI and the CDC (Centers for Disease Control).
“I’m not here to dismiss concerns about the increase in crime in the city. But a bit of context is in order.”
The context is first of all the comparison that is essential with other major American cities. But of the six largest cities in the country, namely New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix and Philadelphia, it is Big Apple which remains the safest if we stick to the number of homicides recorded by the FBI and local police departments.
During the year 1990, New York had deplored no less than 2,245 homicides. But the homicide rate continued to decline for twenty years, before the trend reversed from 2015. In 2018, there were 289 homicides in New York. There were 462 in total in 2020. Conclusion: “In 2021, New York’s homicide rate was less than a fifth of that in 1990,” observes the columnist. On the contrary, “In Philadelphia it’s higher today than it was in the early 1990s and in Chicago it’s almost equal. Which means there is a growing gap between New York and other major US cities.”
Please consider all data
But homicides are not the only causes of death to be considered to assess the level of security, underlines Justin Fox. “The risk of being killed on a train or a subway station is much higher in New York than where there is no subway.” But if you add up all the risks of going to work, school, or anywhere else, “This is an other story”. However, it is in small towns and rural areas that deaths linked to traffic accidents are the most numerous. “Rural living, especially driving long distances on two-lane roads away from any emergency services, can be a high-risk activity.”
“New Yorkers are about three times less likely to die in a transportation-related accident than Americans living anywhere else. And if you add the homicide and transportation risks, New York starts to look like a safe haven from ‘the Great American Carnage’ [selon l’expression de Donald Trump].”
Even the poor seem safer in New York
It is still necessary to take into account mortality due to all other “external causes” of death – accidents occurring in the course of a professional or leisure activity, from drowning in a swimming pool to being bitten by a venomous snake. Data provided by the CDC shows that “the risk of death from these types of ‘external causes’ is three times higher in rural and small town America than in the nation’s largest city”.
“The conclusion seems to be that the more urban your environment, the less danger you are in. High homicide rates in some cities mean that central counties in major metropolitan areas are on the whole somewhat more dangerous than suburban counties, but this is the only exception.”
Living in the biggest city in the country seems to have advantages even for the less fortunate, continues Justin Fox. Thus, county-by-county statistics for “external cause” mortality show, unsurprisingly, that the safest places in America are the affluent suburbs where the median income per household is over $100,000 (98,000 euros). But of New York’s five boroughs, three boroughs where it remains below $90,000 are still in the top 15 of these particularly safe areas: Staten Island, Queens and Manhattan. And even Brooklyn (48th out of 3,077 counties in the United States) and the Bronx (127th) are not so badly placed in this ranking.
Still, even the safest places in the United States look like “battlefield” compared to most European cities and rural areas, recalls Justin Fox to finish. “In Paris, a city described in 2016 by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as ‘so, so, so out of control, so dangerous’, the rate of Homicide remains well below 1 death per 100,000 inhabitants and that of deaths due to traffic accidents below 3 per 100,000 inhabitants. Which means Parisians face a combined risk about three times lower than that faced by New Yorkers.”
Columnist’s conclusion: there is still a lot to be done to improve security in New York.