Comment by Kye
1 year ago
There isn't a propaganda machine trying to make Manhattan look dangerous, so I don't think anyone thought this was random.
1 year ago
There isn't a propaganda machine trying to make Manhattan look dangerous, so I don't think anyone thought this was random.
There's an ongoing "all the big liberal cities are scary" vibe in much media that's been internalized by a large proportion of the population.
I know multiple people (and have myself experienced this) who've been greeted with warnings and concern from relatives when traveling to major cities... when those cities have violent crime rates far lower than the places they/we live. Like, a fifth as much or lower. It's still "common knowledge" that e.g. Manhattan is way more dangerous than a "safe" red state suburban/exurban county (LOL, very not necessarily true) and that the largest cities must be way more dangerous than small and mid-sized cities (also very not necessarily true).
As someone who lived in NYC all the way from the early 80s up until 2 years ago and still has to travel there regularly for business, NYC is a lot closer to how it was in the mid-80s than any other point during that period.
Especially post-9/11 up until COVID it was practically Disneyland. You had little chance of being a victim of random crime in the vast majority of city neighborhoods or on the subway. That's certainly not true anymore. (Caveat: In 2009 I was drive-by shot at on gang initiation night on 96th St & Columbus Ave in Manhattan. Yes, it happened, but place and time are important factors.)
Also we've seen a return of large storefront vacancy numbers in Manhattan.
Where I live now people truly do not lock their doors. Most garage doors in my neighborhood stay open 24/7.
I think to some degree the problem is a combo of some overestimating among part of the population (driven in part by recall of actual historical crime rates, and by anti-"blue"-city news media) of how dangerous big cities are, but also a huge failure to appreciate how dangerous lots of non-big-city places in the US are. It's not entirely that big US cities are necessarily super-safe (they're largely not, if you compare to international peers) but that lots of non-big-city parts of the US are shockingly dangerous, including many parts that folks don't expect to be.
> Where I live now people truly do not lock their doors. Most garage doors in my neighborhood stay open 24/7.
Rich suburban and small towns—and I mean where the whole area's kinda rich, not just a few neighborhoods—are in fact the sort of safe that lots of people incorrectly assume all suburbs and small towns are. I know how it is, I (now) live in one of those too, so Manhattan is in-fact more dangerous than where I am (these days). :-)
Like, my kid's neurologist lives just up our street and there's a country club every half mile, it seems like. Yeah, this particular place is quite safe. Go figure, if there's vanishingly little poverty around there's also very little violent crime. But lots of US suburbs, rural towns, small suburban towns, and smaller cities are really, really poor and there doesn't (any more? Maybe ever?) seem to be some kind of aw-shucks folksiness of attitude that effectively counters the effects of that—they're just as crime-ridden and dangerous as you'd expect, from the poverty stats.
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people in your neighborhood leave garage doors open overnight? never heard of this. seems like you'd want to keep wildlife out at minimum.
Anecdotally one of my colleagues recently moved from W. Va to the CA and his entire family are constantly fearful for his family because they have been conditioned to think liberal cities (and even CA in general) is a crime-infested cesspit. Like his whole family is praying for him weekly - even many months after the move.
My ex-home red state has double the murder rate of NYC. Not New York State, the city. DOUBLE. The stats where I actually lived were even worse (and I lived in one of the better counties in my area).
Nonetheless, always the tedious ritual of warnings and concern when I traveled to any "real" city. Like, guys, save that shit for when I'm coming back. I should be warning you, I'm leaving danger. And please stop watching cable news and listening to AM radio.
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My brother once told my mother to warn me about "Protests" in my city around the time that Portland Oregon was having it's fun. The vibe he sold her was a busy protest crowding through the streets shouting slogans and clashes with police.
The actual protest was about ten people laying on the ground in front of the police station in silence. There were a couple cops standing in front of the building, presumably slightly less bored than doing paperwork at their desk. Most people in my city didn't even know it happened.
It's insane the reality they live in. These people will see https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.... and chuckle and say how bad the "mainstream media" is and then go back to watching Fox News scream about how a liberal city is on fire with protests despite NOTHING HAPPENING. I can't understand the willful, intentional ignorance that leads people to believe watching an hour of Fox News makes them knowledgeable about a city of a million people.
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I will believe this if you show me the stats. You can use homicide rates, since they're hard to fake or badly under-report, and since many of the other stats crime stats also look pretty good for NYC and I expect you'll dismiss them as extremely incorrect—and it's not unreasonable to worry that they might be, so, you can just use the homicide rates.
Maybe one "scary" big city is managing to do hide far-worse homicide rates than they actually have. Are a bunch of them? Maybe, I guess, I doubt it but maybe. If a bunch of them are successfully hiding a lot of murders, though—are towns and small or mid-sized cities in poorer states just unable to hide theirs as effectively, since they are often really high?
Of course, you do see more crime with higher density and with a higher proportion of travel on foot rather than by highway. That doesn't necessarily equate to higher risk.
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nice comment to make every here know you may have seen NYC on a postcard once or twice in your life :)
There's literally propaganda on Fox News going on right now blaming or at least connecting this to undocumented migrants.
https://bsky.app/profile/justinbaragona.bsky.social/post/3lc...
Sure, but there's a lot of speculation that it was a wronged customer. It could have been someone he works with. It could have been someone from his personal life. People who are not Healthcare CEO's also are murdered, there are lots of possible motives.
We don't even know that the killer got the right person.
> We don't even know that the killer got the right person.
The rest I agree with but this part we know, right? CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are not randomly gunned down... It 100% could have been anyone that committed this crime but they 100% got the right person...
> CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are not randomly gunned down...
Why not? I don't think random chance really cares about a person's occupation, it's just more unlikely because there are fewer of them.