Cities should be for living, not dying

The post-Floyd US crime explosion takes more lives

One of the silliest talking points of the last decade involved right-leaning American journalists writing about heavily Muslim parts of western European cities and warning about ‘no-go zones’.

It was absurd because even the most dangerous European city is nowhere near as violent as any equivalent in the United States. London doesn’t have no-go zones; there are just areas you don’t want to go to, and certainly not live in — and the worst areas are not especially Muslim either.

Paris has some very scary suburbs, but both the British and French capitals have homicide rates of around 1.5 per 100,000, safer than the safest US state. Even perhaps the most dangerous in western Europe, Marseilles, is at around 3 per 100,000, just below New York, considered one of the least violent large American cities.