New York City ranks in the top 15% safest of more than 800 U.S. cities, according to a pioneering new analysis from researchers at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, suggesting the effectiveness of the city’s efforts to mitigate homicides there.
New York City ranks in the top 15% safest of more than 800 U.S. cities, according to a pioneering new analysis from researchers at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, suggesting the effectiveness of the city’s efforts to mitigate homicides there.
In a paper published in Nature Cities a research team has explored the role that population size of cities plays on the incidences of gun homicides, gun ownership and licensed gun sellers.
The researchers found that none of these quantities vary linearly with the population size. In other words, higher population did not directly equate to proportionally higher rates of gun homicides, ownership, or gun sellers in a predictable straight-line way across cities. The relationships were more complex than that.
This finding prompted the researchers to apply a data analytics measure called Scale-Adjusted Metropolitan Indicators (SAMIs), to filter out population effects, allow a fair comparison between cities of different sizes, and support principled analyses of the interplay between firearm violence, ownership, and accessibility.
« People often cite per capita rates of gun violence as evidence about whether gun laws work in any given metropolis—or even how safe cities are compared to each other—but that actually isn’t completely accurate, » said Maurizio Porfiri, the paper’s senior author.
