How To Reduce MuggingsAccording to clueless
mugging victim Matt Yglesias:
To offer a policy observation, higher density helps reduce street crime in an urban environment in two ways. One is that in a higher density city, any given street is less likely to be empty of passersby at any given time. The other is that if a given patch of land has more citizens, that means it can also support a larger base of police officers. And for policing efficacy both the ratio of cops to citzens and of cops to land matters. Therefore, all else being equal a denser city will be a better policed city.
There are two things wrong with Matt's theory:
1. Crime is higher in high-density areas.
2. Passersby are less likely to intervene to stop a crime.
