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Post by Ganbare! on Apr 11, 2010 7:06:40 GMT -5
Personal Safety Ranking 2008 includes the following criteria: Relationship with other countries; Internal Stability; Crime & Law Enforcement www.mercer.com/referencecontent.htm?idContent=1307990Central European cities are the world's safest, it doesn't come as a surprise that alpha cities: NYC, London and Paris rank pretty low. Tokyo is unexpectedly more dangerous than Sydney or Vancouver. Could organized crimes or gangs be responsible for the Japanese capital's average rank? Is perceived safety different than actual safety? While New York is one of the safest US metropolis, it doesn't really feel safe once you leave Manhattan and some residential parts of town. On the other hand, I've always felt safe in Montreal no matter where I went even in desert streets late at night. How safe do you think your city/neighborhood is?
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Post by Ganbare! on Apr 22, 2010 10:10:56 GMT -5
Actually Paris, NYC and London do not even make it but they were respectively ranked 63rd, 92nd and 79th in the previous year ranking. Honestly I still don't understand how Tokyo ranked so low, it seemed such a safe city..
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Post by davidbleo on Apr 23, 2010 4:14:55 GMT -5
Mexico is one of the safest places to be... especially if you stay at a Holiday Inn! content.usatoday.com/communities/hotelcheckin/post/2010/04/gunmen-storm-holiday-inn-in-monterrey-mexico-statement-from-intercontinental-hotels-group/1This happened 3 blocks away from my job in downtown Monterrey... and during the same night there were more than 10 shootings in different parts of Monterrey (Mty)... Right now there is a war between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas... the Zetas use gangs of teenagers to steal and burn cars to make blockades in the main avenues and give them time to escape. They are well organized, they've blocked all the avenues in Mty within minutes (in a city with a population of 4 million). The army patrols the streets day and night and they've commited serious mistakes, they stormed into a private university and killed 2 post-graduate students thinking they were gunmen. Three weeks ago, the army was chasing a truck with gang members, but suddenly they got confused and shot a different car, killing a woman and wounding her husband (that happened 2km away from my house... I actually heard the shooting). Since a month ago, nightclubs are empty and people (myself included) only have parties at homes with a few friends and keeping the noise down. Two weeks ago, I was going home from my job, walking to the subway... and a car stops next to me and two friends of mine... the 2 guys inside the car asked us what were we doing there... and right after that both persons in the car were pointing at us with guns... luckly I only lost 450 pesos (around 40usd).... the same day of the kidnappings at the Holiday Inn I was outside of the building I work at... waiting for a pizza we ordered and a van with gunmen with AK-47's stopped like 10 meters away from us, they looked around and then they moved on... I only joked with a friend, "I think they were not the pizza guys"... we're getting used to this s***. I'm sick of it all... and seriously thinking of goin' to the States... legally or ilegally...
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Post by Ganbare! on Apr 25, 2010 10:40:55 GMT -5
^I read about the bloody drug war, unfortunately it's starting to spread to Southern California and Texas... It's scary how violence is surging everywhere, developped and Third World countries alike.
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Post by jefe on Apr 26, 2010 22:30:04 GMT -5
HK is quite safe. You are much more likely to get hit by a taxi or bus than experience any street crime. I got hit by a taxi in Feb., so I guess the streets are not safe?
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Post by davidbleo on Apr 28, 2010 13:52:14 GMT -5
I just found a very interesting documentary about crime photographers in Mexico City (the city in which I grew up). Especially from the "Alarma!" magazine... one of the "kitschest" papers in Mexico... here is the third part: www.vbs.tv/newsroom/alarma-3-of-3--5
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Post by betahat on Apr 28, 2010 14:01:15 GMT -5
^It's scary how violence is surging everywhere, developped and Third World countries alike.
Well, the perception of violence is surging whether or not that is actually the case. The same thing happens with crime rates generically. Perception of global and local violence trends has a lot more to do with media coverage than facts, though I won't argue that in Mexico things have gotten worse in the last few years since the government declared war on the cartels.
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Post by admin on Apr 28, 2010 19:07:31 GMT -5
Noise, violence....no wonder I live in suburbia!
David, you should head to the States - maybe just visit for a while and see how you like it. I would worry about catching a stray bullet or even getting misidentified down in Mexico right now.
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Post by Ganbare! on Apr 29, 2010 14:22:27 GMT -5
^I wouldn't recommend davidbleo to move to the States considering how widespread violent street crime is, that said property crime is actually better than in the majority of industrialized countries. I don't find NYC very safe, I don't even want to imagine how it is in LA. ^It's scary how violence is surging everywhere, developped and Third World countries alike. Well, the perception of violence is surging whether or not that is actually the case. The same thing happens with crime rates generically. Perception of global and local violence trends has a lot more to do with media coverage than facts, though I won't argue that in Mexico things have gotten worse in the last few years since the government declared war on the cartels. Media coverage definitely increases the perceived level of violence nevertheless statistically is has significantly risen in Europe, Africa and Latin America the past two decades. The situation in Asia is apparently contrasted, developped cities like HK or Tokyo are blessed with low street crime rates but the mafia is still there underground, involved in narcotics trafficking and blackmailing.
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Post by betahat on Apr 30, 2010 1:38:19 GMT -5
^level of violence nevertheless statistically is has significantly risen in Europe, Africa and Latin America the past two decades. I just don't see the evidence, sources below: Political Violence www.regjeringen.no/nb/dep/ud/kampanjer/refleks/innspill/engasjement/mack.html?id=492750Crime rates papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1117972rechten.uvt.nl/icvs/pdffiles/ICVS2004_05.pdfIncluding contact crimes (Fig. 21 and 22 especially) And some alternate UN crime statistics 16 February 2010 - A new UNODC statistical report shows stable or decreasing global homicide trends over the period 2003-2008 for the majority of countries for which data is available in the Americas, Asia, Europe and Oceania. www.unodc.org/unodc/en/frontpage/2010/February/global-homicide-rates-stable-or-decreasing-new-unodc-report-says.htmlI just love it when my hunch is confirmed by actual statistics. Looks like some parts of Latin America and the Caribbean are the main exceptions. But the data all seem to point a decrease in global crime/violence. Certainly no evidence that "violence is surging everywhere, developped and Third World countries alike. " You're welcome to continue the debate but it's going to be pretty hard to overcome all this data without some of your own. Unfortunately the places that might make your case -esp. many developing countries that are under-represented in the survey - have such poor data that I don't know if you'll be able to make your case one way or another. Which goes back to my point that (in the absence of data) perception is everything...
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Post by Ganbare! on Apr 30, 2010 10:55:29 GMT -5
^I completly agree country-wise, what I mean is that street crime (not prostitution, financial/high tech crime or robberies) has risen in many large metropolises, with the notable exception of US and Canada's. Mexico, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Johannesburg, Paris or Berlin have all reported ordinary violent crime increases over the past decade. I was not referring to murders as they are unrepresentative of total crime instead I was thinking of violence one is more likely to face: physical and sexual assaults, kidnappings or verbal threats.
I have not found international cities crime rate trends figures but there is a Foreign Policy issue documenting the evolution of violence in major metropolises individually. It detailed several offenses thus not limiting crime to just murder, the figures were pretty solid as they were provided by the national statistics office of each country while not extrapolated like certain IO resort to.
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Post by betahat on Apr 30, 2010 15:43:15 GMT -5
The most interesting hypothesis is that it's just demographics - the share of young males who primarily commit crimes fell in the EU-15 countries and North America. Some developing countries might have different trends since their demographic evolution is different. Still, at least for the ICVS countries the average trend is a decrease in contact crimes, which includes physical and sexual assaults. In an international perspective the US begins to look more like an aberration - even the lastest recession hasn't affected the ongoing decline in violent crimes in big cities and eslewhere, despite having the same issues with poor migrants, etc. that European, Asian, and Latin American cities face. That's also the reason I don't credit Rudy's broken window policies - the New York crime rate didn't fall by much more than any other major US city. www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60613K20100107Here's all I could find from Foreign Policy for the countries you mentioned: Mexico had a decline in murders and kidnappings over the last two decades while in South Africa murder declined but robberies increased: eurasia.foreignpolicy.com/category/topic/drugs_crimeCan't find the article or issue you mention. But again for South Africa www.saps.gov.za/statistics/reports/crimestats/2009/totals.pdfthe trend is clearly decreasing. Now of course this doesn't tell you about Johannesbury specifically, but I assume it drives a lot of the crime statistics because of its size and because its a high crime area. Of course, if you cherry-pick your cities, particular crimes, and periods you can always find an increase or a decline, but the overall trend does not seem to be "violence is surging everywhere, developped and Third World countries alike" or "violence nevertheless statistically is has significantly risen in Europe, Africa and Latin America the past two decades" - it looks mixed or maybe even a modest decline.
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Post by Ganbare! on May 1, 2010 9:41:01 GMT -5
^A dozen of big metropolises concentrating crime is significant enough. When I wrote "everywhere" I was thinking of these cities, anyways you're right about the steep decline of violence at a larger scale.
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