Is Alaska safe?

[rwjoyak]

Originally Posted by slowlane3

813 per 100,000. That means a 1/120 chance of being a victim of violence in a given year....or about a 70% chance of being a victim of violence sometime in your whole lifetime (if a person lives in Anchorage their whole life, and if the rate remains the same).

Your math assumes a flat distribution of crime across the entire population, which isn't the case. It will be instead a normal distribution - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution. Folks on the upside of the curve, who experience more crime, are the ones that live riskier life styles, such as talking drugs, associating with questionable folks, going places where crime is higher, etc. Those who are smart and avoid such risks, and are even smarter about being very observant of their surroundings (they have good situational awareness), will be much lower on the curve. For such a person, the chances of being a victim of violence in Anchorage, or almost anywhere else in the US, are very low.

[haggardhouseelf]

Thank you all for the responses! We are excited and looking forward to learning more about Alaska. Even if we end up not relocating there, I hope we get to visit someday. Thanks for the insightful replies.

[nng]

Well I lived in Fairbanks Alaska until I was 17 before I moved to the lower 48. I never had anything bad happen to me while living there. But if you look at the statistics, the rate of rape and domestic violence is higher on average compared to other states.

[akpls]

I lived in Fairbanks for almost 30 years and never had a single thing happen. Never felt unsafe anywhere, and as a Land Surveyor I worked almost everywhere in town. Are some neighborhoods better than others? Yes of course, but none even remotely compare to some places I've been that I do consider unsafe. In my opinion, if you don't go looking for trouble, the odds of it finding you are low.

[riceme]

This thread has been bothering me and I have hesitated to respond, but here-goes.

I've lived in and around Fairbanks for a while now, and when I was dirt-poor, lived in the ghetto in town. Even then, I never felt unsafe, and have never had anything bad happen to me around here.

I will tell you where something bad did happen to me: Kansas. I lived in a very nice, very quiet neighborhood, in a brand new home in a nice, small/mid-sized town. I took all the precautions that a single woman in her mid-late 30s should take. A stranger broke into my house in the middle of the night and attacked me while I was sleeping.

I know how to defend myself, and I did, or I tried to. A few years prior, I took a semester of women's only self-defense, and I had taken a handguns course a couple years before that. The combination of those two things saved my life that night in Kansas.

The things I continue to carry with me are situational awareness, being safe and prepared for things that might happen, but most of all, I don't put myself in bad situations, and I do not and will not live my life in fear. Not just for my own peace of mind, but because predators smell fear. They can see it in how we carry ourselves, hear it in our tones of voice, and those things make us targets.

Statistics are just that: statistics,... numbers, data, information that can be used to our advantage. I think post #12 above about normal distribution is right-on. Statistically, what happened to me in Kansas was not very likely to happen, but it did. I have lived places where it would have been more likely to happen, but it didn't.

Life is what we choose to make of it.

[WyoNewk]

Sorry for your horrible experience, Riceme. It sounds like you did everything right, but all that does is reduce your likelihood of being attacked. Nothing can guarantee your safety, unfortunately.