This is Part 3 of a series on violent crime. See Parts 1, 2, and 2.5 here.

So far, I’ve looked at violent crime on a state-by-state basis. However, while looking at the numbers this way tells us which states are violent, it doesn’t tell us where in each state the crime is occurring. Therefore, I opted to look at New York violent crime on a county-by-county basis. My violent crime per capita stats come from dividing the amount of violent crimes reported in each county (taken from the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Statistics) divided by the population of each county (taken from the Census Bureau). Percentages of NAMs come from the Census Bureau. I used 2007 data in all instances due to the absence of 2008 New York City crime data. Here’s what I got:

Yep, the trend of NAMs being the cause of violent crime holds up even at the county level. Some observations:

The most violent county in New York, the Bronx, is also the least white. The least violent, Tioga, is in the top ten counties that are the most white.

All of the state’s major cities are represented in the top ten most violent counties, including four of New York’s five boroughs, Buffalo (Erie), Albany, Schenectady, Rochester (Monroe), and Syracuse (Onondaga). Additionally, three NYC boroughs (the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan) are in the top five.

The whitest NYC borough, Staten Island, also has the least amount of violent crime.

Albany County is the fifth most violent county in the state. And Jerry Jennings still stands a good chance of getting four more years?

Tompkins County, home to Ithaca, is pretty low in violent crime. SWPLs don’t kill people.

Saratoga County is the least violent county in the Capital District and one of the most white. It is also the fastest growing county in all of New York.

Who knew that Franklin County had so many NAMs? It’s a rural area straddling the Canadian border with no cities, major or minor. The same goes for Greene County, which has more NAMs and crime than Rensselaer County, home to Troy, one of the Capital District’s central metropolises.

There is an unmentionable racial element to Upstate/Downstate conflict. Looking at the table, we can see that Upstate and Long Island are largely white, while New York City is dominated by NAMs. I’ll be writing more thoroughly on this topic later and what it portends for New York and the rest of the nation.

UPDATE: sestamibi offers a correction for the correlation value, which I checked out with my calculator:

One correction: the value you show for correlation is actually unadjusted R-squared. Correlation therefore is square root, or 0.833187–even higher than the value you cite!