Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by yes_really | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

yes_really

Western European cities have been getting more violent.

View on HN

London murder rate per million in 2024: 11.6 NYC murder rate per million in 2024: 43

And from what I read, NYC is exceptionally safe for a US city, and London is exceptionally unsafe for a UK city.

104 murders in London in 24/25, 535 in the whole of the UK for the same period

Overall crime and especially violent crime is falling in the UK but there are some well publicised hotspots - phone theft, shoplifting

NYC is very safe for an American city, but London is not particularly unsafe for a UK one; its violent crime rate is about average for England as a whole.

You are right. Should not have relied on the most likely LLM-generated description attached to the data. I trusted it because I already had the wrong impression that it was less safe, but that was just because the raw number of crimes is high because it is very populated.

As a general rule of thumb, probably never trust anything an LLM says; they're bad at things.

(I'm particularly unsurprised that they'd get confused about _London_, because, well, what is a London anyway? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_London . Even _human_ writers sometimes get confused about stats for London.)

What do you think that difference in homicide rates proves? It’s caused entirely by racial disparities in homicide victimization rate. The NYC homicide rate for white victims is about 9 per million: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_p... (7% of 343 homicides divided by 2.7 million). The homicide rate among white people in London was also about 9 per million: https://aoav.org.uk/2024/londons-2023-murders-examined-key-f... (43% of 103 homicides divided by 4.7 million).

It seems unlikely that this pattern of homicides would be explain by differences in general government policies between the U.S. and UK, such as healthcare policies.

The post I was replying to was edited and originally claimed that London had higher murder rate than New York.

I’m sure you can a find a city or two where this is true, but the general trend in most places is slow reduction since a peak in, usually the 80s or 90s. It’s not well-understood _why_ this is.

Social media tends to make people _feel_ like there’s a lot of violent crime.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com