Two Kinds of Unsafe: Security in American and Russian Cities

Walk through central Moscow at midnight and through parts of an American city at midnight, and the experience is not the same. But “safer” turns out to be the wrong word for what’s different. We compare what the two feel like and where that feeling comes from. Street crime versus gun violence, and why those produce completely different habits. How policing differs, and what each system is actually good at. Why American safety varies enormously block by block in a way Russian cities mostly don’t, and what that does to how people choose where to live. The kinds of risk that are invisible in crime statistics — traffic, corruption, who you can call when something happens, and whether calling helps. And the part that interests us most: the gap between how safe a place is and how safe it feels, and why that gap runs in opposite directions in the two countries.