To start trying to unpack that question, let's look at one major element of violent crime: gun violence.
One way is to judge overall violent crime and per capita crime rates to see how the city is performing compared to past years; that's what Hochul and the city's mayor are pointing to when saying their subway deployments are necessary.
But another good way would be to look at how much gun violence there is in a given city compared to how well you'd expect it to do for a city of its size.
And on the gun homicide front, a new study shows, New York City is majorly overperforming. In fact, it's performing better than any other big city in the country.
That's one finding of an innovative new study by Rayan Succar and Maurizio Porfiri, the director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering.
You can read the full study in the journal Nature Cities to learn more about their methodology, but to sum up what makes their research unique: They used urban scaling theory — a form of analysis that has only been around for about 10 years and that has primarily been used to research things like wealth distribution and population growth — and applied it to crime.
They looked at nearly 1,000 US cities, studying a number of different relationships between gun access, crime, and population, and aggregated multiple data sets in the six years leading up to the pandemic. Their modeling allowed them to compare the actual prevalence of gun violence in a given city to how the model predicted a city of its size would behave.
One of their major findings is that gun homicides scale superlinearly to the population in cities — in other words, the bigger the city, the larger the number of gun crimes per capita.
In more rural areas, on the other hand, there are more guns but fewer gun homicides. So while cities have fewer guns per capita, Porfiri says, "they are responsible for more violence than what would happen in a rural area."
There are some theories as to why this is, and most have to do with increases in social interaction. As Succar puts it, "If you interact with 200 people per day, there's way more possibility you'll get shot than if you're interacting with five people per day."
Maybe that's good news for people who believe that they're safest in a rural area far from big cities with a large stash of firearms (though the research on the risks posed to people who keep firearms in their homes might want to have a word).
But it isn't the entire story.
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