Do you have some data on that? Wikipedia shows that out of the top 100 US cities NYC is roughly in the middle for violent crime rate. Pretty much any crime map is showing it as a hot spot.
Is this the list you were looking at [0]? NY is 20/100 for murder, 16/100 for rape, 40/100 for robbery (where 1 is safest). Below the national average for murder & rape according to [1] (above it for robbery, which isn’t great, but at 40/100 I’m guessing that robbery overall is more prevalent in cities and NY is still doing okay compared to other cities.)
Not sure what maps you’re looking at either, but visualizations of stuff like this sometimes mess up if they aren’t accounting for pop density well. NY is very big and very dense, over twice as many people as the next biggest (LA) and twice as dense as the next densest big (>1M people) city (Chicago). [2] (Note these are actual city boundaries comparisons, not metro area, which I believe is consistent with the crime stats used.)
I think the person you responded to is still technically wrong that “NY is the safest it’s ever been”. Crime rose nationally around 2020 and I think it’s only this year we’re starting to see pre-COVID crime levels again a lot of places. I think they were probably thinking of in comparison to the bad old days of the 70s, when NY was decidedly unsafe.
NY has problems like everywhere else. And with >8M people terrible things that make the news will happen every day even at below-average crime rates. But put in the perspective of large urban dense cities I feel like the city is kinda okay from a crime perspective.
Yes, I was looking at the violent crime rate subtotal from your first link which places it at 42/100 at a rate of around 539 per 100k. The national average is around 381 per 100k. Being significantly above thw national average and close to the middle of the top 100 cities, does not seem like it "has one of the lowest violent crime rates in the country" to me. These are based on rates, so population isn't a direct factor and it will still show as a hotspot on any national or state level map since it's significantly higher than average and surrounding area.
The biggest, densest city in the country being below-median among other major cities for that stat still seems pretty good to me! Particularly since 1. NY is dragged above the national average on the cumulative stat by what are arguably “less severe” violent crimes (i.e. not murder, rape) and 2. Almost every city ranked better on that stat is very small comparatively, only two have >1M people. Every city that you could really consider a real peer of NY (LA, SF, Chicago, Miami, etc.) does worse.
Also, when ranked by that total the “best 4” aren’t really the best 4. They don’t report rape numbers, so they don’t get a total. And their numbers are all worse than NY on the other categories (murder, robbery, assault).
Of countries which have experienced at least 1000 intentional homicides in a given year, NYC is comparable to Thailand, Zambia, Kenya, Peru in terms of murder risk
Manhattan might have more mentally ill homeless people than before but as someone who grew up in Brooklyn and Queens things are way safer than they used to be, mostly thanks to gentrification (mostly due to Bloomberg rezoning the Brooklyn / Queens waterfronts) and not any of the recent mayors.
The gentrifying parts of Brooklyn + Queens (and the Bronx!) have gotten better—-no thanks to tweedledee and tweedledumb. But the parts that were already middle class have gotten worse, just like Manhattan.
