Great work, haertig. I'm pleased and impressed that you rose to the challenge.

Originally Posted By: haertig
Scroll down until you find New York City. You will see that there is a "Rate per 100,000 individuals" row down a few rows below New York City. Unfortunately, this rate/100000 is for a group of cities including New York City, but you can calculate the rate for NYC alone using the raw numbers. For New York City, it shows the population is 8,336,002 and the number of violent crimes is 48,489. Doing the math, you will see this comes out to a "Rate per 100000" of 581.7 for New York City.

Now scroll up and down that Table 6 and compare 581.7 to other cities. The vast majority are well below New York Cities numbers. A few are higher (look at Anchorage Alaska with a rate of 812.9). A few are far lower (see Bangor Maine with 68.4).

So there are a few scattered cities that are higher than NYC, but most are quite handily below it.


If you break up the statistics further, you'll see the large area aggregates (giving only the "rate per 1000000" for huge areas composed of many cities) disguises a lot of high crime rate cities. Detroit has an insane rate of 1887.4 violent crimes per 1000000, for example. San Francisco and Oakland are also surprisingly high. But these are not individually computed. So I am suspecting that NYC is more middling than your analysis above suggests. That does mean if we're talking about cities in general, then NYC doesn't look distinguished. So point taken.

However, if we're looking at a particular subset, say the biggest cities, perhaps things are different, and it may not be evident from the chart. My cursory calculation suggests that NYC's number may look pretty good for big cities. That agrees with the NY Post article that I quote in the previous post. It states: "New York has the lowest crime rate of the 25 largest cities in the country... Following New York in the lower crime rates for big cities were San Jose, Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Houston, Dallas and San Antonio." These places are all far bigger than Bangor.


Edited by Bingley (04/23/13 06:50 AM)