Beautiful and interesting cities with rich histories can be found around the world. Unfortunately, some cities are set apart not by their beauty or history but the relative safety of tourists in those cities. How can you know if a city is safe to visit? You may want to leave emotion and sentiment aside in favor of more objective data from the likes of international agencies such as UNODC or step into another's shoes and review experience-based data sources such as Numbeo.
A comparison of the Numbeo crime index to socio-economic indicators from the OECD shows that crime levels are higher on average in cities with higher youth dependency ratios and population density. In other words, if the number of young people (ages 14 and below) is high relative to the number of working-age people (ages 15-64) then the crime level in the city will probably be higher. The same scenario plays out with population density within a city: the greater the population living in a city's core areas, the higher the crime level.
Over the past two decades, the United States has seen a significant decrease in crime. Between 1991 and 2013 crime rate fell from 1,311 to 689 offenses per 100,000 population. In absolute terms, a number of crimes reduced by 8.5 million during the reference period from 28.3 million in 1991 to 19.8 million in 2013. The estimated number of violent crimes in the nation decreased 0.2 percent in 2014 when compared with 2013 data, according to FBI figures. Property crimes decreased by 4.3 percent, marking the 12th straight year the collective estimates for these offenses declined. The 2014 statistics show the estimated rate of violent crime was...
In 2015, at least 892 "hate" groups were operating throughout the United States, according to Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). This represents a 14 percent increase from the 784 groups recorded a year before. Still, the current figures are lower than the all-time high in 2011 as traditional organised extremism continues to shrink in favor of collective and individual cyber-based activism. The SPLC defines a hate group as an organised movement that has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people based on religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, nationality, and other immutable characteristics. The SPLC monitors...