Why are American cities much more VIOLENT than other world cities? (new house, find a job)
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It makes basically no sense to compare homicide rates between different cities, because cities are normally to small. For example there is 1 homicide in a city with 100,000 inhabitants, the homicide rate is 1.0. Next year there is no homicide, the rate is 0.0, and after next year there are 3 homicides, the homicide rate jumped to 3.0. The population is to small and therefore the homicide rate vary strongly. It makes not that much sense to compare homicide rates between areas with a small population.
Where are your data from? A murder rate of 0.04 in a city with a population of 272,068 (Plano, Texas)? 0.04 murder per 100,000 inhabitants? That means for this city 0.1088 killed person? You can kill 1 person or multiples thereof, but it isn't possible to kill 0.1088 persons :-))
In my opinion only San Diego with a population of over 1 Mil can be called very large.
And the murder rate anywhere south of Market street in San Diego is probably way higher than anywhere in Europe.
Because Americans are more cold and unwelcoming to strangers in comparison to other first world countries.
Job security may be a reason for that too. The "you may take my job one day so I don't want to befriend/love you mentality"
No, sorry, but I think that's completely nonsense. Are Americans colder than Germans? I don't think so. And Germans have a bigger problem with strangers than Americans have, sadly.
Job Security? No, because the job security decrease in all western countries over the last 20 years, but the homicide rate fall markedly at the same time.
It doesn't. For the many poor in the US, crime is the only way out of poverty. And then there is the large middle class sliding down into poverty. Crime rates will probably increase even further in the future.
People say this as they are trying to be dramatic in discussions about the US's politics, but in reality the middle class is not sliding down into poverty. The middle class has challenges on some levels for sure, but if you go through any typical suburban areas you will see that for the most part, the middle class is doing just fine. Challenges for some, yes- how to pay for quickly rising college educations for kids, tightening budget as energy costs rise, those kinds of things- but not a massive slide down into poverty. And as the economy rebounds many are climbing back up as well, tons of middle class people are buying new bigger houses, new nicer cars, etc. as they get more comfortable again after recovering from the economic troubles of the past few years.
It doesn't. For the many poor in the US, crime is the only way out of poverty. And then there is the large middle class sliding down into poverty. Crime rates will probably increase even further in the future.
I think poverty is only one reason for the higher crime rate. I think it is a big difference, whether someone steal something or rob someone to get out of poverty or to harm or kill someone. Normally there is a strong boundary between the two cases. And of course the overwhelming majority of the poor people are nice and not criminal.
Like in other western countries crime in the USA also decreases, at least violent crime.
I think that's an important point. It is often very difficult to compare statistics from different countries. I know that Germany distinguishes between homicide and manslaughter. The homicide rate from Germany that is used for such international comparisons add homicide and manslaughter together. I guess that is done for the other countries, too. The homicide rate for Germany also includes the murder attempt. Is that also the case in other countries? When I understand the figures for Canada correctly, than the homicide rate for Canada is 1.9 and an additional murder attempt rate of 2.6.
In 2012 there were 630 homicides (incl. murder attempts) in Germany, thereby were 281 people killed. The 630 refers to the everywhere released homicide rate for Germany of 0.8 per 100,000 inhabitants. If only the 281 were considered the homicide rate would be at 0.35 per 100,000 inhabitants. Homicide rate and murder attempt halves from the mid 90's. That's seems to be normal in every developed country.
Very good described. I know that the police authorities ascertain crime data for all the different Cities and "Kreise" (counties) in Germany. This data is also published. But almost no one is interested in these data. Because the differences in crime between the areas are very small, so the data is very uninteresting. The crime in poorer districts isn't higher than in affluent districts. I often read in this forum someone ask where in the xy region are the safe areas to life. Normally no one ask such questions in Germany. Of course people wan't to life in a nice and beautiful neighborhood, but they don't think about the crime level in certain areas.
Your numbers for Germany are off a commercial site.
Singapore 0.4
Tokyo 0.5
Hong Kong 0.6
Berlin 1.0
Sydney 1.0
London 1.4
Toronto 1.7
Amsterdam 1.8
Paris 4.4 New York 6.0
Los Angeles 7.5
Mexico City 8.0
Moscow 9.6
Sao Paulo 15.6 Chicago 19.4
If you look, the American cities are way more violent. I'm mean...compare Chicago or Los Angeles to Tokyo or Berlin. Why is that?
American metros mostly have a large gap in murder rate by the city and its suburbs, that's not found in other countries. (Many western US cites don't have a big gap). If you took the metropolitan are murder rate, which encompasses the entire region's population, the gap is much smaller, though still high.
3/4 of the murders in the Chicago metro are in Chicago or Gary despite those two cities holding 1/3 of the population. With a metro-wide rate of 6.4 Chicago would still rank higher than any western European metro but lower than Moscow, Sao Paulo or Mexico City. Many American metro areas are lower, and would rank close to western European levels.
Your numbers for Germany are off a commercial site.
No, the numbers are from the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), it's the Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany. You can look at the most recently data. Why do you think that they are from a commercial site?
The data for the aggravated assault seems to be very tricky, because the definition vary from country to country. If you look at the data from Eurostat, some astonishing numbers can only be explained by different definitions or grades of assaults.
We shouldn't be comparing ourselves to countries that are way worse than us, but way better than us.
Although the violent crime rate in the U.S. has declined dramatically over the last 20 years, it is still unacceptably high for a developed country.
The U.S. definitely has problems integrating its low income minorities - which are a substantial percentage of the population - socially and economically into the mainstream society. That is the real issue.
But the US has had a very different history than western Europe or even Canada. Like Latin America, it has had an historically deprived minority population. None of the other developed countries had a large slave population in modern times. Argentina and Mexico haven't either, but they're poor and with historically large income inequality.
Vancouver and Seattle had roughly similar murder rates in 2011. 1.8 per 100k for Vancouver's metro, 2.1 per 100k for Seattle's metro. By city proper, Seattle was a bit higher (3.3 vs 2.5) than Vancouver.
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