Hunter: Americans have a very distorted perception of how safe a city is.
Here are three different questions:
How likely are you to be murdered in the next year?
How likely is the median person in your city to be murdered in the next year?
How likely are the most murder-prone people in your city to be murdered in the next year?
I suspect that these diverge pretty widely.
Perhaps related: My understanding is that a large portion of property crime in the US today doesn’t look like the popular impression of “property crime” — robbery, burglary, shoplifting, purse-snatching — but rather is in forms such as fraud and wage theft.
Wage theft is kind of like an economic parallel to domestic violence; it is insidious because the victim often has an ongoing dependence on the perpetrator. If the person or firm who pays your wages is stealing from you, raising a fuss about the theft runs you the risk of not having any paycheck at all.
Here are three different questions:
How likely are you to be murdered in the next year?
How likely is the median person in your city to be murdered in the next year?
How likely are the most murder-prone people in your city to be murdered in the next year?
I suspect that these diverge pretty widely.
Perhaps related: My understanding is that a large portion of property crime in the US today doesn’t look like the popular impression of “property crime” — robbery, burglary, shoplifting, purse-snatching — but rather is in forms such as fraud and wage theft.
Wage theft is kind of like an economic parallel to domestic violence; it is insidious because the victim often has an ongoing dependence on the perpetrator. If the person or firm who pays your wages is stealing from you, raising a fuss about the theft runs you the risk of not having any paycheck at all.