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Comment by bertil | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure about the tone of that message, but I have lived in several cities where this was the case: Oslo, Singapore, Helsinki, Stockholm come to mind as places where even “dodgy” areas have had until recently very little instances of systematic robberies.

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The chance to be involved in an armed robbery are small in every big city in the world. Based on anecdotes people will always over or under exaggerate the chances.

Just to give a counter example: I lived in Brussels, Philadelphia, Oslo, Sao Paulo... the only place about which I have a first hand "armed robbery" story was in Oslo of all places: a coworker got actually shot in the back when he bravely (but stupidly) turned his back and said "no, you are not going to shoot me".

He was lucky and was only a couple of weeks out but he carried his X-rays of the bullet with him because nobody would believe him otherwise.

Can't say about the others, but I didn't feel much safer in Stockholm when I worked there for a couple of months in 2005. I didn't think it was particularly dangerous, but I would say the same of Rio.

I probably should have referred explicitly to that experiment: http://www.rd.com/culture/most-honest-cities-lost-wallet-tes... It came out when I was living in Helsinki, and my colleague first concern was to find out what could have happened to the twelfth wallet. I asked if anything would come back intact, and their response was telling: “Not phones. If a phone is found lost, I would upgrade software: you don’t want to risk security. Then find the owner.”

One anecdote that might be telling: someone left their wallet in front of me in Stockholm metro. I was concerned, trying to imagine a way to get it back to him; the Swede sitting opposite me was surprised that I didn’t know I could hand it to any employee of SL safely.

Most if not all of Switzerland is the same.

There are still some incidents that happen from time to time. In Geneva I've heard of someone going out for a smoke from a hotel accros from the main train station, and getting everything robbed; I've also heard of someone being beat up to the point of loosing an eye in Nyon (a town near Geneva). We also had the famous case of a guy who picked up hitchhikers, assaulted them before killing and abducting their bodies. Did so 11 times before he got caught [0].

[0] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Peiry

That's a far cry from being unsafe cities :)

Sure, there are isolated anecdotes like the ones you quote - but there is not a single area of either Geneva or Nyon where I wouldn't walk around with an iPhone at night (I grew up in the Nyon region, then moved to Geneva's as a teenager FWIW). The worst that you can expect is someone trying to sell you drugs, or begging, or getting into a drunken argument (like basically anywhere in the world where humans live)

Not to mention, that's probably the "worst" region of the country - I live in Bern now and you'd be hard pressed to find someone who would not bring your iPhone back to you should you leave it on the sidewalk at night.

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