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I agree that people are often miscalibrated regarding safety levels, whoever, I think we tend to overfixate on murder as a crime statistic. Murder is, obviously (or perhaps not so obviously, given recent events), very bad, but it is thankfully pretty rare. Below some fuzzy threshold, people's feeling of safety will be more tied to overall crime rate than murder rate (particularly as murder seems to be very concentrated in certain areas and demographics).
It's fair that only looking at the murder rate might obscure otherwise meaningful differences in safety levels. However there is also a very good reason that murder is often used in discussions of crime rates (including by historians); it's the most straightforward and most unbiased statistic, for the simple reason that it's hard to hide that someone has been killed. Once you get into other crimes, you start getting much more bogged down into things such as reporting rates, definitions, etc., which make comparisons rather fraught.
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Fair enough. Per this list:
It really does not seem to me like the differences are as stark as is being implied. Germany has slightly more crime than eastern Europe, and Ireland and the UK have slightly more crime than Germany (although even then Ireland ends up with a lower GOCI score than Germany, where lower GOCI is better). It looks like a trade-off, where in exchange for significant economic growth you get a marginal bump in crime rate. None of the cities under discussion are Detroit or Baltimore (or even, to the best of my knowledge and perhaps more relevant to the discussion, Malmö).
The economic differences are a lot older than the ones in immigration, and the crime used to go the other way.
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