I feel safe there

I only semi-thought through this post so if you think I'm way off - speak up, because I might be (even more than usual).

I think that people often describe if they feel safe or not somewhere, and I think that people make real decisions based on these statements (I completely include myself in this). I imagine that a person's feeling of safety has some value - having watched most of The Wire in the past few weeks I can clearly distinguish that Mountain View is safer than the projects in Baltimore (not stepping on crack vials is always a good start). But I know my personal "safe feeling" meter has far too strong of a weighting on other people being around which has lead to some silly situations where I started watching over my shoulder while walking through a residential section of Brookline just because there was no one else around. I wonder what really goes into if a person feels safe. Hopefully people feel unsafe long before seeing any obvious signs of violence. I have to imagine that it is largely based on wealth and unfortunately I bet at least a portion is based on race. Whatever the indicators are, they are almost certainly regional or specific to a given country. Graffiti is probably a strong sign to many people from the suburbs. Not sure how it would strike people from major cities in the US, but I know that in some countries where violent crime is minimal compared to the US, graffiti is almost universal. Based on no evidence I would guess that the safety sense probably has some value in areas someone is familiar with, but becomes increasingly less valuable as the person travels further away, especially as that travel becomes international. Which is unfortunate since that's basically the inverse of a person's need for a safety sense.

Even if people have a great internal violent crime detector, that does not help with many other safety factors. In the US far more people die from car crashes than from murder. I guess people do sometimes discuss the roads and types of drivers in different areas, but again it is often what they sense and I feel like it has a less significant impact on travel and moving decisions.

In many foreign countries violent crime is so much lower than in the US that the other factors have to almost entirely be all that matter. In some countries terrorism is the bigger concern (often even if statistics show otherwise). Again, I'm pulling all this out of my ass, but I can't imagine the average person has any in-built sense for if one area is more likely to be hit than other. Clearly you can read the news and be told which areas are good and bad, but just walking around who is going to sense that they are in a spot that is likely to be struck. In fact, I believe that many terror strikes are at targets that would otherwise seem safe which is to some degree the point of the attack.

Not only do car crashes kill more people than violent crime, but heart issues kill even more. So when you are considering moving or traveling maybe the question to ask people isn't how safe they feel there, but instead how are the roads/drivers, how healthy is the food, and how prevalent is smoking. Actually - for anyone with indicators of heart issues the first question should be - what is the average ambulance response time (Update - see happyredpigs' comment for better information).

I do think that the safety sense has some value, and I will almost certainly describe how safe places feel to me at some point not long from now, but I imagine if you really want to know, you're better off looking up statistics than asking how safe someone feels. I guess the big advantage of getting someone else's feeling is it indicates how you will feel while you are there and stress/happiness could also be more important than the exact crime rate. The other nice thing is that you can always just tell your worried parents that you feel safe without needing to bother with any research or facing the fact that you are living/visiting somewhere really dangerous.