The only two statistics I trust for comparing crime prevalence across municipalities (let alone countries) are homicide and grand theft auto rates. Most other crimes suffer from differences in classification/definition, reporting procedures, or willingness of residents to report them to the police. Homicides and grand theft auto by comparison are very consistently reported and stand in well for violent crime and property crime respectively.
So when it comes to concerns of safety, I’m going to trust the recorded homicide rate much more than whatever metrics feed into numbeo’s index. And NYC has a homicide rate nearly three times as high as either London or Paris. That’s much better than many cities in America, which can surpass 5 or even 10 murders per 100k residents a year, but it’s still more dangerous than most European cities and substantially so.
Car theft isn’t great for comparison because of vastly different car ownership rates, different kinds of cars, values etc…
For example, from 2019 to 2022 car thefts skyrocketed while other property crimes declined. Mostly because people figured out that Kia’s during that time were really easy to steal.
> Most other crimes suffer from differences in classification/definition, reporting procedures, or willingness of residents to report them to the police.
From what I can tell they use victim impact surveys and other surveys as well as crime reported to police to ameliorate that.
>homicide rate
Your theory is called the tip of the iceberg theory and it isn’t meritless but it isn’t very reliable either.
Different studies show different correlations between murder and different types of violent crime.
But the correlation in general is only moderate even within a country. Across counties, it’s much lower.
In the US guns are much more common, than in Europe, so so a crime like attempted murder that is highly correlated with murder within the US isn’t going to be highly correlated across the US and Europe.
For example, if it takes 3 attempted murders in a city with easy gun access to produce 1 murder, it might take 10 in a city where guns are hard to get. So you could be underestimating the attempted murder rate in that city by 3x.
So when it comes to concerns of safety, I’m going to trust the recorded homicide rate much more than whatever metrics feed into numbeo’s index. And NYC has a homicide rate nearly three times as high as either London or Paris. That’s much better than many cities in America, which can surpass 5 or even 10 murders per 100k residents a year, but it’s still more dangerous than most European cities and substantially so.