EN -- LARRY ROMANOFF -- The World’s Safest Cities -- August 02, 2021

 

 

The World’s Safest Cities

By Larry Romanoff, December 02, 2019

 

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There are occasions where the Americans want to publish a list that demonstrates their innate moral superiority over the rest of the world, but they hesitate because the lies are too large even for them and would expose them to unlimited ridicule.

In such instances, they have a friend do their work for them, depending on a highly-regarded third-party reference in an attempt to make the hypocrisy more palatable. On this occasion, they enlisted the services of the Economist Magazine’s so-called “Intelligence Unit” to produce a list of the world’s safest cities. The results should surprise even you, with places like Chicago, Washington, New York and Los Angeles placing right up there near the top. (1)

 

The methodology was innovative to say the least. To most of us a safe city is one where we are safe; that means personal safety, with little or no likelihood of experiencing the normal events of daily life in America which would include being mugged, killed, raped, stabbed, framed by the FBI, or shot dead by the police.

 

But American cities cannot compete on these metrics so, with the help of their friends in the UK, designed new metrics in four categories, namely digital security, health security, infrastructure safety, and personal safety, each allotted 25% of the total ranking. So now getting shot by the police in New York or stabbed by one of the 400,000 muggers in Chicago or Washington assumes equal importance with losing your credit card or tripping on the sidewalk. Let’s take a quick look.

 

Digital security related to a city’s “cyber security teams”, whatever that means, probably the extent to which the NSA is recording everything you say, and, interestingly, the “frequency of identity theft”. By the way, did you know that London has one CCTV camera for every six citizens, and that the US is quickly heading in the same direction? Health Security was based upon things like the number of hospital beds, a nation’s life expectancy, and the incidence of cancers. Then we had Infrastructure Safety, based on things like the quality of its roads, bridges and dams, and the “number of deaths from natural disasters”. And lastly, we had Personal Safety, based on some kinds of reported crimes.