My parents have left their car doors unlocked, their house wide open, keys on the dash, money in plain sight, for 40+ years. Not once, not even even once, has a theft occurred.
Violent crime however is a certain reality in NYC.
That said, the numbers don't really lie: New York (the state, including the city) ranks lowest in burglaries per capita[1]. For larceny theft, the state is also towards the bottom[2]. Those are state numbers, of course, but almost half of the state lives in the city.
[1]: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-most-burglaries-in-t...
[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/232583/larceny-theft-rat...
When I first moved to NYC, it was a wet, slushy winter. My wife left her shoes outside our apartment door to dry off overnight, in a locked building with about 12 other units.
By 7am the next morning, they’d vanished. I had to go buy her replacement shoes.
We didn’t report the theft; why bother? The police couldn’t and wouldn’t do anything about it.
The next four years in NYC weren’t all that different; lots of petty theft and crime, all the time, everywhere. Unreported and unresolved.
These days, I live in the mountains outside of Boulder. Absolutely zero crime over the past 10 years. Our yearly murder rate up in the hills is zero, and has been zero for decades.
Unless you're saying that people in New York disproportionately don't report crime that doesn't change much about the rankings. And also having lived very rural and very urban my intuition is that there is significantly more unreported law-breaking in the countryside (sometimes for the mundane reason that there barely is police in the first place).
People in New York don’t report crime that disproportionately occurs in places like New York.
How do you know it is disproportionately? I live in a suburb (not in NY) and I've never reported petty theft. What would be the point? Police isn't going to do anything about it.
I guarantee you it won't.
I rode my bike to high school (in a "bad" neighborhood) regularly, and locked it outside with a regular cable lock. It was never stolen. When I got a job, I locked my bike up with the same cable lock for months, until I got access to the bike room. Never stolen.
Bike theft does happen here; I know people who have had bikes stolen. But it's not particularly common, even given the rise in expensive e-bikes.
> Do you seriously believe that there's some kind of omnipotent bike theft ring in NYC, poaching bikes as soon as they're locked up?
Literally yes. Do you even actually live in NYC?
I’m not blind to some advantages I have: I’m tall, have a large frame, and a deep voice. But I was also a little kid for the first 18 years I was here, and nothing bad ever happened to me.
Yes, I really do live here. And yes, there are bike theft rings. But they’re not omnipotent, and they’re fundamentally opportunistic; I’ve never had any issues with any bike I’ve owned being stolen, and neither has anybody else in my family.
> I went to public schools here
There's a world of difference between a public school in a wealthy area and one in a shitty one. The former might as well be a private school in terms of the quality of instruction and available funding from PTA donations.
I'll do the same in my small midwestern town.
We can repeat this experiment until you run out of money.
That's why we use per capita statics.
My cell phone: will be returned by my neighbor.
I'll take the "bias" in the numbers all day lol
Edit: And in no time someone chimes in about their safe life they currently live in Tokyo, Japan -- probably the safest large city in in the entire world and one if if not the safest country in the world. Hope y'all have your visas ready. Of course we know this is in bad faith, because the Japanese analogy would be to compare Tokyo to rural Japan not to small town America.
My brother lives in a small town, and kids in his neighborhood shot their kids with BB guns. They have issues with neighbors leaving their dogs off leash and attacking their dogs. They've had people from the neighborhood try to run them off the road. None of these things get reported to the police, because the police won't do anything, and you'll start a crazy feud with the neighbors. You don't hear about family feuds in the city, but they're a constant in small towns and can last generations.
I've lived in New Orleans, NYC, SF, and Tokyo, and other than New Orleans, I'd say every place has felt safer than when I lived in small towns or the country when I was growing up.
Most cities, especially nowadays, are quite safe. I think small towns are generally also safe, but from my personal experience, I've found the country to be less safe than cities because you're effectively on your own.
I think perhaps the city is safer for people who solve things by reporting problems to authority, whereas country is safer for those who rely on themselves. If you live in rural areas and depend on police for anything other than helping get the word out and possibly picking up someone after the fact, you are just fucked.
Really?
> When I first moved to NYC, it was a wet, slushy winter. My wife left her shoes outside our apartment door to dry off overnight, in a locked building with about 12 other units.
I kinda feel sorry for your wife shoes, but personally I wouldn't even list that in theft: unless you live in Japan, yes, things left outside your house DO tend to vanish, especially if left overnight!
> The next four years in NYC weren’t all that different; lots of petty theft and crime, all the time, everywhere. Unreported and unresolved.
Can you please share more? Because our definitions of theft seem so different that I seriously wonder what you call crime.
Personally, I've always felt safe in NYC and NJ. Oh god I miss the good food from Palisades Park...
> These days, I live in the mountains outside of Boulder
I have visited Boulder and noticed quite a few things besides the obvious like how it's not welcoming to smokers (smoking is banned everywhere). Among the disturbing ones, the police force seems to enjoy harassing the homeless. I was told about that and didn't believe it until I witnessed it with my own eyes. That's far more concerning to me to have shoes stolen outside my home.
Also, people felt kinda fake? As in, lots of virtue signaling, but I felt uneasy in a very creepy way.
It's very hard to describe. It suffices to say there's no amount of money you could pay me to live in Boulder, while NYC stills feels like home even if I don't live there anymore.
Maybe my few days of visit was just a fluke, but it's rare I've felt so bad about a city to say something as harsh.
That's quite a sad thing you've grown used to. I've lived in suburbs in several states and not one would have me saying that things left outside my house tend to vanish.
You should expect more from your fellow citizens. Not stealing is a basic decency and sending thieves to jail should be a basic tenet of society.
This is exactly analogous to blaming someone for walking home at 3am through a badly lit area while visibly having money, or being attractive and dressed to show it.
I've lived here my entire life, and I've never had my shoes stolen from outside my apartment, whether the building was locked or unlocked. I'm sorry that that happened to your wife, but it's a single instance.
This warrants introspection on your part: if you're afraid but the people actually here aren't (including every woman I know), is it possible that your idea of the situation doesn't reflect its reality?
* NYC recorded 6,486 burglaries in 2021, for a population of 8.38 million. That's 77.39 burglaries per 100,000 people, which makes the city's burglary rate lower than the rest of the state.
* The city recorded 18,862 grand larcenies in 2021, for the same population. That's 225.08 larcenies per 100,000 people, which is also lower than the rest of the state.
Both burglaries and larceny are up this year, significantly. But even if they double, NYC will still be well below national and state averages.
Edit: Correcting myself: the final statistics[2] for robbery in 2021 show 12811 robberies, for a final rate of 152.88. That's still a fraction of NY state's burglary rate, which is the lowest in the nation. For grand larceny it's 487.71, which is also still below both state and national averages (by two thirds).
[1]: https://compstat.nypdonline.org
[2]: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_...
As a poster above you mentioned, why report a crime if you know nothing will be done.
I suspect a survey of residents, asking questions like, "have you had anything stolen that you did not file a police report about?", would reveal relative urban versus suburban or rural propensity-to-report trends here better than official crime stats – but I don't know of such a data series.
I've never had to file a police report for theft in NYC (where I've lived for 20+ years), because I've never had anything stolen from me. Unless you count the kid who, in third grade, stole my Pokemon cartridge. But the response to that involved schoolyard justice.
But "independent adult" also doesn't mean much. I was riding the subway alone by the time I was 7 or 8, and didn't have anything resembling a curfew.
In small towns and cities all around the world, people don't report crimes for a variety of reasons. It's not clear why that would be more true in NYC than elsewhere.
If you were talking about petty theft, I'd agree with you, but for the most part, burglaries are nearly always reported.
Then please define "violent crime", because from what I've seen below (some shoes stolen outside a home) isn't what I'd even list as theft.