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Comment by syrgian | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.)

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