This is false. Urban areas have the highest rate of crime compared to rural and suburban. For example look at the years 2020 and 2021 from this report:[0]

Table 8

Rate of victimization, by type of crime and location of residence, 2020 and 2021

Location of residence

Total violent crime Violent crime excluding simple assault Total property crime

2020 2021* 2020 2021* 2020 2021*

Urban 19.0 † 24.5 7.7 9.7 158.9 157.5

Suburban 16.8 16.5 5.6 5.2 90.5 86.8

Rural 13.4 11.1 4.5 4.4 65.6 57.7

You can see clearly that urban has the highest rate of crime, and this has been true for decades.[1]

Also, many crimes are not recorded at all in NYC, which is why many stores have locked down all their items with a key that requires permission from a staff member to access. I haven't seen this in the small towms I've been to.

[0] https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv21.pdf

[1] https://ovc.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh226/files/ncvrw2018/...

There’s possibly a fantasy mindset at play where people need a certain identity to be true. As we’ve witnessed on a national scale, humans have great capacity for fantastical thinking to support what a friend of mine calls their “binkie narrative.”

His small town? Tallinn is comparatively tiny to NYC admittedly but Dubai is a fairly large and urban city. I think that it doesn’t quite fit the appellation.