OK, seriously. You guys are messing up a good thread. Take it to PM. Please.

I don't have an "urban" kit. I have some stuff in my car that might well be useful for such a kit, but I never got around to actually making one.

The thing is that in urban areas you have access to a lot of resources at hand that just don't exist out in the woods, so I guess I feel the need to have some things in the woods that I don't see as especially necessary anywhere else.

I don't go to urban areas much anyway. I live 60 miles from Chicago, and I avoid it like the plague. The nearest "big" city is Rockford and it is not that big. I tool around the area a fair amount but many places I go I just would not be comfortable carting around a big pack of stuff. In fact, many of the places I go would take a dim view of me bringing it in with me. Some places won't even let me bring my cell phone, apparently fearing some kind of industrial espionage, although at least one of these places has now relented somewhat and allows outside service people to bring cell phones as they often need to call for technical help, and I come under that umbrella.

Incidentally, I find the typical writing mistakes I see in others' posts jump right off the screen at me, but my own not so much. I wonder if that is because I know what I wrote even if that is not what I actually typed.

FACT: NYC Is one of America's safest cities.

Not my stats, Forbes Magazine's stats:

http://www.forbes.com/pictures/egim45edhe/10-new-york-n-y/

Whatever credibility they might have had, is no more. I think Forbes must have some kind of weird agenda in publishing a statement like that. They also published Aurora Colorado as a safe city. Well, I happen to live near the Denver Metro area (or which Aurora is part). Aurora is not really considered a terribly safe place in just the state, let alone nationally. I mean, it's not as bad as Chicago or Detroit, but there's no way a Colorado resident would spout off and say, "Now Aurora, THAT's a safe city." Falling right behind Denver, Aurora is gang city. What a load of BS Forbes.

Accusing a source of an agenda without being able to spell out what it is isn't exactly persuasive. If you can cite better sources or statistics, please do so. I mean, if facts don't matter, I can just say, "Every colorado resident thinks Aurora is the safest place to live in. Haertig must have some kind of weird agenda is posting a statement like that."

Here's a source that proclaims NYC's safety record, citing FBI stats. I haven't dug up FBI's original report -- maybe NY Post misrepresented it (it's not a great newspaper, after all) -- but you should if you want to dispute it:

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/regional/item_KwpQPtSU9ivJn69UinZMWM

A few relevant sentences: "One small thing about the Big Apple is the crime rate -- New York is America's safest big city by a mile, new FBI crime stats show." "And of the 261 cities with more than 100,000 residents, New York's crime rate ranked 246th." "The story was far grimmer in small-town America in 2008... Places with fewer than 10,000 residents charted a 5.5 percent rise in murders, a 1.4 percent increase in rape and a 3.9 percent rise in robbery."

I don't think this is the definitive statement, but it largely agrees with my experience of living in New York. NYC became much safer during Giuliani's mayorship. Was it because of his police tactics, or was it because he just got lucky with the economy? Who knows, but it got safer.

REDACTED

Are the facts from the FBI Universal Crime Report OK with you?

Here they are:

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/ucr-publications#Crime

From there, go to the section "Crime in the United States"

You will see that 2011 is the latest data that is not considered preliminary. Click on 2011.

Click on the "Violent Crime" link on the resulting webpage. That click will take you here:

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/cri...e/violent-crime

Now look over on the right side of the resulting page. There is a list of twenty-some-odd tables. Hover your mouse over "Table 6". You will see that a popup says: "Crime in the United States by Metropolitan Statistical Area". Click on that ("Table 6").

Here is where you will be after all the above navigation:

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/table-6

Now you can see data for tons of cities throughout the US. Of interest are the columns "Population" and "Violent Crime".

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.

So much for NYC being "one of the safest cities". I wonder where Forbes got their data? I am citing the most recent FBI data, the same data that Forbes claimed they used. You can look at the preliminary data for 2012, but it doesn't include the detail you need to look at individual cities. And even if Forbes did have access to some secret unpublished FBI data, wouldn't you find it hard to believe that NYC amazingly jumped from one of the worst, to one of the safest in only one year?

If something smells fishy, it probably is fishy. Coming out and saying NYC is one of the safest places to live is just contrary to common knowledge. Swallowing a claim like that hook, line and sinker shows the gullability of the US population, and the unethical/bias/agenda/whatever of Forbes.

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



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.

This debate has very little to do with the OP, (Maybe a new thread is in order?) and I hate the idea of helping us get sidetracked further, but it does illustrate an important point:

"America's safest city by a mile"? ummm... 246th out of 261 isn't first place...

I was a History major, not Math, so maybe I'm missing something, but it illustrates Bing's suggestion nicely: do your homework before you move to, work in or travel through an area, and before you determine your priorities for edc, ghb, bob, etc. (You just might want to find a source of info that can do it's basic math right before you put your faith in it.)

When we first moved into the AO we now live in, the headlines and stats screamed at us. Had we blindly listened to them, I'd be edc'ing a full on hazmat suit, KI pills, radiation monitor and a shovel for digging a hasty bunker. I wish I had spent as much time researching the stats about water main failures as I did nuclear accidents before we bought our house. It turns out that water is a higher priority on the threat list for our family.

I can see a Locked Thread happening if we don't get back on topic which is "My Urban Kit".