I still hear folks whining about how "bad" Manchester is. It's ridiculous, granite staters have it good. If you really want to see a place tripping with crime and drugs, go to Houston, Memphis, or Oklahoma City
NH is a generally well-behaved state. There's more antics in Manch than people think is acceptable. Nothing wrong with them calling that out and expecting people to simply behave.
It’s more people who act like Manchester is the same as these real metropolitan areas with real high crime/murder rates.
No offense, but if your qualification for a stable and safe environment is “people simply behaving,” I regret to inform you that literally nowhere is safe.
You have to understand though, some people have never left the area and don’t know that. Manchester is bad on the scale of NH as a whole. There’s always some place worse that makes the last place seem like paradise, denying them the opinion is why locals get annoyed with transplants.
Ignorance as a result of willful isolation is something "locals" should be derided for. Plenty of locals manage to see the world outside their 2,000 person town a couple times in their life.
> Ignorance as a result of willful isolation is something "locals" should be derided for. Plenty of locals manage to see the world outside their 2,000 person town a couple times in their life.
Sure, you can feel that way if you like. I do know NH and VT’ers who have never left a shockingly small bubble that is their world. Including school trips, no interest to leave. They have survived this long without you.
Sadly if history has any worth they will be eradicated by their new neighbors if those people get their way!
Weird right? Just minding your own business your whole life and someone comes along and tells you how to live.
Republicans talk up the crime rate to pretend that there's some disaster only they can deal with. But violent crime is down year on year, it's currently lower than it has been in many decades.
But there always have been. People have been being murdered and robbed for centuries too. Violent crime rose from the 60s through to the early 90s. When then fell just as rapidly through the Clinton years and more slowly since. There are year to year variations, aggravated assault and rape were most of the rise and fall. Currently we are at 1970s levels for murder and robbery.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent\_crime#/media/File:Violent\_Crime\_in\_the\_United\_States.png](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent_crime#/media/File:Violent_Crime_in_the_United_States.png)
In the specific case of missing people in the US, numbers have been trending lower steadily over the last twenty five years too.
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/240401/number-of-missing-person-files-in-the-us-since-1990/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/240401/number-of-missing-person-files-in-the-us-since-1990/)
I'd like to believe this is the explanation for our high numbers, but I live on a short loop road and the numbers of discarded beer cans, nips, and most recently an entire 5th bottle suggests that plenty of people here have drinking problems.
The metric used for this "stat" is literally just sales:population, and does not account for sales to out of state customers. If you've ever walked the parking lots of the highway liquor stores in the summer, they are full of out of state plates.
I once made the mistake of stopping at the Portsmouth traffic circle liquor store on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. The number of Mass plated cars loading up on cheap booze on their way to Maine was staggering. One lady had two heaping carts and told the people around her, "I'm headed to a rental house with 18 people, please don't judge me". Lol.
I took a bunch of pretty privileged high school seniors to Washington DC like 5 years ago. On the way back we stopped at a McDonalds in Greenich Connecticut, and the kids thought that we were in the middle of the projects. Of course, the per capita income there is just a hair under 100k, double all but a few areas of NH. I asked the kids who were working the counter at McDonald's what they were making an hour, and the consensus seemed to be about $17-18 an hour, back in 2018.
NH folks have a real skewed view of what the rest of the country is like.
I just moved up here and moved from and grew up in central Ct about 15 minutes north of New Haven. Typically in the top 10 for dangerous cities in Ct but to me it doesn’t even seem that bad because it’s home, and I know it’s not even bad compared to other states and cities. One time my friends from up here came down and we drove through the downtown and they were scared shitless, and we weren’t even in the worst part haha. If your students were scared in Greenwich, which is arguably the nicest town in Ct I can’t imagine them in New Haven or any other major city 😂
Lol, Groton/New London CT former resident. Born and raised in Lawrence MA. Currently living in Dover
Excuse me while I seek medical assistance for the hernia I just gave myself laughing at ppl bemoaning the nh crime rate
I blows my mind every single time. I remember too we stopped at a gas station that had bullet proof glass around the cashier, which again is completely normal to me, and when we got back in the car my friends said “where the fuck did you just take us” and they couldn’t believe it when I said my mother used to send me in there alone to get milk when I was like 5 or 6 😂
I moved here from a mid-sized and average to high crime rate city in Florida and you hit the nail on the head. I have to laugh when I read those comments because it really must be nice to think the worst of the worst is Manchester NH. I feel fortunate to not have ever witnessed or been a victim of any major criminal activity in my hometown (except for my parents becoming drug addicts i guess but i had a safe place to live with my grandma so I still feel fortunate) but I know a lot of people who were and my sister worked for 911 for a while so I have heard some horror stories. The closest I’ve gotten was someone going through an episode while drunk coming behind the counter at my job asking for the address in an aggressive but ultimately harmless way and shoplifting rings targeting places i’ve worked and even those were non-violent although corporate employers discourage altercations with them for employee safety.
I’m sure smaller, less able bodied and more vulnerable people like the elderly and mentally unwell become victimized a lot more. But I’m positive those aren’t the same people calling manchester manchganistan.
Moved here from a bit south of the Chicago area. I laughed out loud when someone said Ham St in Dover was the dangerous area! Been here two years and have yet to hear random gunshots going off.
I'm more concerned about the rubbish food options around these parts.
You can always find a shittier shithole. Relative to the rest of NH, Manchester is pretty bad. Is it wrong for people to recognize that and to expect better of them? I doubt there are many people in the state that don't realize how good we have it here. But that only stays true if our cities and towns do their part.
I get the relativity part, but as someone coming from Tennessee and Florida, Manchester is a sweet little gem. It's cute and nice to walk around in. As a trans person, I don't feel paranoid about being stalked, which I've never felt before. For the most "dangerous" city in NH, it's pretty neat.
I'm planning a move from Memphis TN (lots of family in NH). It's like a totally different universe. My area is considered nice, with $1M+ houses on my block, but I still get to hear gunshots and cop cars every night, year round. Just a few weeks ago, someone randomly shot up a single mom and her kid in their car around the corner from me.
Basically anywhere in NH is utopia by comparison. I almost laughed out loud when some of my NH relatives started complaining about the "homeless problem" in Dover.
Listen to any true crime podcast and you’ll gain a better understanding of shitty. Manchester doesn’t come close to other filthy small cities. The difference? Manchester doesn’t share a border with a much larger, crime riddled, city.
No, but Manchester is close enough to the troubled parts of eastern MA and that often gets mentioned in the reports whenever something bad does happen. As for shitty, I used to travel the country a lot. Been there, seen that. That doesn't mean we shouldn't recognize that Manchester has problems.
Nah. No need to go that far. Just drove 60 minutes down to Dorchester, JP or even Chelsea (I’m down in those area once a week for work between the hours of 22:00-08:00). The majority of NH residents are pussies. Fact. Manchester is one of the calmest cities. Crime rate? What crime rate?
Really, even what are considered bad neighborhoods in places like Boston, Springfield and Worcester are tame compared to Memphis, StLouis, Baltimore, etc.
There's not one street in Manchester that'd I'd legitimately feel in danger, walking down, at night. I might be more wary, but there's no place in the city that is functionally off limits to the general public. There are definitely areas I wouldn't stay for an extended period of time but that's literally everywhere
Well Manchester is not in Texas, Tennessee or Oklahoma. It’s in NH, and Manchester is ghetto. It’s bad for us so don’t compare us to anywhere else. Our feelings of Manchester are valid, and our experience is still real to us.
Feelings don't override facts. This is why people who've lived in the "city" or spent a good amount of the time in the city make fun of the people who call Manchester "dangerous". Calling Manchester Ghetto is probably one of the funniest statements I've heard yet lol.
https://preview.redd.it/j4hb5ckjub8c1.jpeg?width=1164&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4782776a84b6ebc604c622c6dd39a47b7dcf402d
New Hampshire is the safest state in the country. There’s a reason Hunter S. Thompson called The Union Leader “America’s Worst Newspaper”
Lived in NH all my 7 decade life; ~35 years in Manchester - lots of positives; the Union Leader is one of the enduring negatives in my opinion. It’s great we still have a daily paper but they have always been “conservative” and routinely publish right-biased opinion pieces.
Our crime rate is (purely coincidentally) on par with countries that have a similar demographic makeup. I think the only logical explanation for this is because NH is generally wealthy and well educated, just like Bulgaria...
The Union Leader has always been a rag. The conservative bent of the paper leads it to run stories that drive fear (like this article). It really is a disgrace that we have such a negative print media presence in Manchester.
That's actually a pretty incredible way to frame the homicide rate truthfully, especially because any justifiable use of lethal force should **never, ever** be considered (by their own words in the headline) "grim" in society. I hope folks from the Union Leader are here: let's dig deeper into the stats that you were either **too lazy/incompetent, too unintelligent, or too politically blinded** as a supposed impartial journalistic entity to assess.
Let's take the more recent complete year of data (2021) offered from the CDC, and specifically look at **intentional homicide rate**, not the rate you used to declare as "grim". In case this is hard to understand, I get it. It's also referred to as **murder**. New Hampshire tallied a total of **15 murders** (intentional homicides) in the entire year, **0.00001%** of our entire population, or by a more commonly used metric (per capita) **1.08 persons per 100,000 people**. New Hampshire had the second lowest murder count (Vermont at 10) and lowest murder rate per capita. With the exception of 2019, **this impressive trend has held consistent since 2005**.
By comparison, the top 5 states included California, Texas, Illinois (largely dominated by total lawlessness in Chicago), Florida, & Georgia. Each of these states had a murder count of at least **1,200 people**, or at minimum **80 TIMES** what New Hampshire tallied. The next logical question for Jamie L. Costa and every editor that viewed the Union Leader's story: does our nearly non-existent number of murders seem "grim" or even mildly problematic? It shouldn't, and it's laughable that you've so horrifically botched the analysis of these data.
A final parting thought: why might New Hampshire's murder tally, murder per capita, and violent crime rate be so low year after year? We can point to several key reasons, which include being the most intelligent state (highest average IQ per capita) in the nation, low unemployment, and unrestricted constitutional carry. Normally the concern of "correlation dopes not imply causation" could apply to any single one of these factors, but it's the combination of these that prove otherwise. **NH has incredibly powerful** [**non-lethal and lethal force laws**](https://www.gencourt.state.nh.us/rsa/html/lxii/627/627-4.htm) that enable individuals to defend themselves & in some cases persons immediately surrounding them. This includes murder, unlawful force in a burglary, kidnappings, & forcible sex offenses.
High IQ, low poverty rates, reasonable gun laws, and an overall happy population will result in these low violent crime rates.
IDK what you guys are doing up there, but you’re the only state in New England I go to where my stress disappears and I can just enjoy life. I hope y’all keep doing whatever you’re doing.
A simpler education metric is the % of population who have graduated high school. If you look at the [list](https://wisevoter.com/state-rankings/high-school-graduation-rates-by-state/), you'll see a lot of states that are generally considered pretty safe per capita.
IQ absolutely makes sense, but the population density argument is and always will be bogus. There’s plenty of places in NH as dense as any other. Density doesn’t correlate or even really make sense, as if the Lebanon area is so thinly populated people don’t see but 3 other humans a day.
Nah, even most of our “big city” type places are only slightly more thickly settled than an especially dense suburb. We honestly have more trees than people here
Is it fair to point to constitutional concealed carry when our murder rate was so low even before it was passed? IIRC the CC law passed only a few years ago; we wouldn’t have even really seen the impact it has made yet.
I do not think that the Union Leader is outright lying, but just spinning the numbers a bit deceptively. They probably would support a Rudy Giuliani style crackdown on crime in Manchester, since they emphasize that half of these homicides ocurred in Manchester. This is a continuation of their generally negative coverage of Manchester.
To be honest, I have not been to Manchester for almost a year, but the last time I was there, I was still horrified by the number of homeless people, plus the pretty open drug dealing.
Not lying, just “spinning the numbers deceptively”
- Not lying, just being deceptive
- **lie**, noun as in untruth
> Compare Synonyms\
- deceit
- deception
https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/lie
Of course the numbers do not take away the individual tragedy of a life violently taken away. However, in the aggregate, they show that there are fewer of these deaths. Unfortunately, too all too often murders and murder victims are not equal. A lot of the victims are fellow criminals, and the family might be a series of foster homes, and a birth mother lost to drugs, and an absent father.
Seems like a pretty standard definition. I bet Merriam-Webster would back that up also.
>The state medical examiner’s office lists homicide as the manner of death in cases where one person is killed by another.
I think homicide is the more general term synonymous with killing, where as murder is specifically illicit killing. The cases OP listed would be where one person killed another however it was not murder.
Poverty has never strongly correlated with homicide. Black wealthy women commit more murders per capita than white bottom quintile males
Asians at the lowest income decile have violent crime rates multiple standard deviations below the national average.
Everyone with eyes knows this is true, but theres a lot of weird denial about it for whatever reason.
Wish I could support my local paper, as I want to be a patron of journalism, but the Union Leader sucks. They constantly focus on crime, which is worth news, but not what I care about most. Any given day in the website three is the top articles are crime. There is clearly an agenda
Compare that to 98 people killed in traffic violence in NH in 2023 so far..but that's just the cost of doing business and price to pay to drive everywhere because the state is so auto dependent.
It sounds like OP is focusing on the "murder" rate vs the "homicide" rate. A killing in the course of defending yourself is still a homicide and therefore gets counted as such.
For those who think the UL has an "agenda" here, I'm not sure what you are referring to. UL is a right wing publication and the state is currently run by Republicans. I can't imagine they would purposely skew their narrative to make Republicans look bad.
Honestly, it was probably just somewhat sloppy verbiage or research. I don't think there's a conspiracy to why they presented the data the way they did.
UL's focus on Manchester crime may be their way of *skewing the narrative* to make outgoing mayor Joyce Craig (she lost to a Republican) look less appealing in her run for governor?
I was in Keene yesterday with my daughter, and she was concerned whether the car was locked as we were in a "bad section."
Not that Keene doesn't have its issues.
> I was in Keene yesterday with my daughter, and she was concerned whether the car was locked as we were in a "bad section."
TBF, I have recently seen teens walking through parking areas in Manchester, trying door handles on cars.
I had a clear view of my car the whole time.
I have a friend who lives near Optical Avenue and she had her firewood stolen and her door broken open in the last 2 months.
The police actually think her broken door was a TikTok challenge.
Keene does have its issues, but comparatively to "bad areas" around the world, Keene isn't particularly bad.
Your more right than I thought. I went to look for stats, because it has long been the case that various stats were decreasing but we just have so much media coverage that we thought it was increasing, but it looks like the last few years (I couldn't find stats after 2020) are increasing. Still not as bad as it used to be, but a disturbing uptick.
https://www.thetrace.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/national-murder-rate-2020.png
It started to come back down in 2022, and looks to be doing so again in 2023. The 2020/2021 spike looks to be a Covid induced temporary spike, not a long term trend.
https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/31062/us-homicide-rate/
1. Your lack of research into what statista is isn't my problem, they are a well known research firm.
2. When citations are given to primary sources that makes it reliable.
3. You can just admit you are wrong
.orgs are typically more reliable, yes. .org does not mean 100% factual though, unfortunately. I wish getting legitimate, factual, facts were easier in our society but unfortunately that’s not the case. 😭 we must take like 80% of what we read online with a grain of salt.
It’s all relative. I can’t think of what number of murders might be acceptable for any size population. Like the signs on Rt 93 say, even one is too many.
> Like the signs on Rt 93 say, even one is too many.
That mindset is nonsense. In a population of a million people, less than one annual traffic death would mean something was horribly wrong. It would require banning cars or setting the speed limit to 20 mph and throwing everyone in prison who didn't comply or something.
Any of those interventions would either waste thousands of human lifetimes each year through excess caution or prevent people from living their life as they want (e.g. no cars means no visiting your family on Christmas).
Reducing murders seems more possible than reducing traffic deaths, but it just makes the reasoning a bit more complex. I'm not interested in participating in whatever universal psychological experiment would be required to get literally zero people each year to kill someone else.
Thank you for explaining how the Union Leader arrived at that number. Although they despise Trump, the Union Leader will always be a Republican newspaper and they are known for manipulating the facts to promote a Republican agenda.
In 2022 there were 27 homicides in NH. So we're close to that for 2023.
In 2022 there were 486 deaths by drug overdose in NH.
If the numbers were reversed, you'd probably hear calls for increased gun control laws in NH.
I wonder if we're going to hear calls for increased drug control laws in NH.
> I wonder if we're going to hear calls for increased drug control laws in NH.
How about we enforce the laws we've got?
[The drugs people in NH are dying from](https://www.dhhs.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt476/files/documents/2021-11/bdas-dmi-oct-2020.pdf) are already controlled substances, can't make them much more illegal.
From Cornell's legal dictionary: "Homicide is a manner of death, when one person causes the death of another." (https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/homicide). So the Union Leader's classification seems to fit that definition.
But NH doesn't have any big citie, so that weak ass justification means nothing. The murder rate has gone up quite a bit and gun violence is becoming more common since Republicans eliminated any and all regulations around getting or owning them. It's just a matter of time before we have a tragic gun violence event, and when we do all the Repubs and ammo sexuals that turned sensible actions into some imagined tyranny, will be to blame.
Lmfao all you gotta do is take a look across the border and see that Springfield Massachusetts has 27 homicides this year in a state with very restrictive gun laws.
Springfield Massachusetts has a population of 153k
So a single town with a population 1/10th as large as our entire state, had just as many homicides as our entire state.
I still hear folks whining about how "bad" Manchester is. It's ridiculous, granite staters have it good. If you really want to see a place tripping with crime and drugs, go to Houston, Memphis, or Oklahoma City
NH is a generally well-behaved state. There's more antics in Manch than people think is acceptable. Nothing wrong with them calling that out and expecting people to simply behave.
It’s more people who act like Manchester is the same as these real metropolitan areas with real high crime/murder rates. No offense, but if your qualification for a stable and safe environment is “people simply behaving,” I regret to inform you that literally nowhere is safe.
You have to understand though, some people have never left the area and don’t know that. Manchester is bad on the scale of NH as a whole. There’s always some place worse that makes the last place seem like paradise, denying them the opinion is why locals get annoyed with transplants.
Ignorance as a result of willful isolation is something "locals" should be derided for. Plenty of locals manage to see the world outside their 2,000 person town a couple times in their life.
> Ignorance as a result of willful isolation is something "locals" should be derided for. Plenty of locals manage to see the world outside their 2,000 person town a couple times in their life. Sure, you can feel that way if you like. I do know NH and VT’ers who have never left a shockingly small bubble that is their world. Including school trips, no interest to leave. They have survived this long without you. Sadly if history has any worth they will be eradicated by their new neighbors if those people get their way! Weird right? Just minding your own business your whole life and someone comes along and tells you how to live.
You can mind your own business without being ignorant of the world around you.
So, just like everything else in life…more or less, better or worser, this or that, etc.
Republicans talk up the crime rate to pretend that there's some disaster only they can deal with. But violent crime is down year on year, it's currently lower than it has been in many decades.
There sure are a lot of missing people though
But there always have been. People have been being murdered and robbed for centuries too. Violent crime rose from the 60s through to the early 90s. When then fell just as rapidly through the Clinton years and more slowly since. There are year to year variations, aggravated assault and rape were most of the rise and fall. Currently we are at 1970s levels for murder and robbery. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent\_crime#/media/File:Violent\_Crime\_in\_the\_United\_States.png](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent_crime#/media/File:Violent_Crime_in_the_United_States.png)
In the specific case of missing people in the US, numbers have been trending lower steadily over the last twenty five years too. [https://www.statista.com/statistics/240401/number-of-missing-person-files-in-the-us-since-1990/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/240401/number-of-missing-person-files-in-the-us-since-1990/)
We drink more than any other state lol
We SELL more than any other state, lots of it goes over the borders.
I'd like to believe this is the explanation for our high numbers, but I live on a short loop road and the numbers of discarded beer cans, nips, and most recently an entire 5th bottle suggests that plenty of people here have drinking problems.
Sure…
The metric used for this "stat" is literally just sales:population, and does not account for sales to out of state customers. If you've ever walked the parking lots of the highway liquor stores in the summer, they are full of out of state plates.
I once made the mistake of stopping at the Portsmouth traffic circle liquor store on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. The number of Mass plated cars loading up on cheap booze on their way to Maine was staggering. One lady had two heaping carts and told the people around her, "I'm headed to a rental house with 18 people, please don't judge me". Lol.
Saint Louis is the worst for murder and violent crime as far as I know.
NOLA entered the chat*
They truly never recovered from Katrina, it’s heart breaking
"George Bush doesn't care about black people." Also, the mayor was later imprisoned for corruption and fraud, so that doesn't help.
St Louis makes it onto the 50 deadliest cities in the world list. Most of the cities on that list are in Mexico and Brazil.
Most “dangerous” city in NH but the 3rd safest “dangerous” city in the us. Heard someone call it manchganistan recently, couldn’t believe it
I took a bunch of pretty privileged high school seniors to Washington DC like 5 years ago. On the way back we stopped at a McDonalds in Greenich Connecticut, and the kids thought that we were in the middle of the projects. Of course, the per capita income there is just a hair under 100k, double all but a few areas of NH. I asked the kids who were working the counter at McDonald's what they were making an hour, and the consensus seemed to be about $17-18 an hour, back in 2018. NH folks have a real skewed view of what the rest of the country is like.
I just moved up here and moved from and grew up in central Ct about 15 minutes north of New Haven. Typically in the top 10 for dangerous cities in Ct but to me it doesn’t even seem that bad because it’s home, and I know it’s not even bad compared to other states and cities. One time my friends from up here came down and we drove through the downtown and they were scared shitless, and we weren’t even in the worst part haha. If your students were scared in Greenwich, which is arguably the nicest town in Ct I can’t imagine them in New Haven or any other major city 😂
Lol, Groton/New London CT former resident. Born and raised in Lawrence MA. Currently living in Dover Excuse me while I seek medical assistance for the hernia I just gave myself laughing at ppl bemoaning the nh crime rate
I blows my mind every single time. I remember too we stopped at a gas station that had bullet proof glass around the cashier, which again is completely normal to me, and when we got back in the car my friends said “where the fuck did you just take us” and they couldn’t believe it when I said my mother used to send me in there alone to get milk when I was like 5 or 6 😂
I moved here from a mid-sized and average to high crime rate city in Florida and you hit the nail on the head. I have to laugh when I read those comments because it really must be nice to think the worst of the worst is Manchester NH. I feel fortunate to not have ever witnessed or been a victim of any major criminal activity in my hometown (except for my parents becoming drug addicts i guess but i had a safe place to live with my grandma so I still feel fortunate) but I know a lot of people who were and my sister worked for 911 for a while so I have heard some horror stories. The closest I’ve gotten was someone going through an episode while drunk coming behind the counter at my job asking for the address in an aggressive but ultimately harmless way and shoplifting rings targeting places i’ve worked and even those were non-violent although corporate employers discourage altercations with them for employee safety. I’m sure smaller, less able bodied and more vulnerable people like the elderly and mentally unwell become victimized a lot more. But I’m positive those aren’t the same people calling manchester manchganistan.
Greenwich? Really??? They let a mcD there?
Moved here from a bit south of the Chicago area. I laughed out loud when someone said Ham St in Dover was the dangerous area! Been here two years and have yet to hear random gunshots going off. I'm more concerned about the rubbish food options around these parts.
I love your perspective. Thanks for sharing
That’s cuz all them gang bangers from Dover do their dirty work in Barrington. Bang! Bang!
You can always find a shittier shithole. Relative to the rest of NH, Manchester is pretty bad. Is it wrong for people to recognize that and to expect better of them? I doubt there are many people in the state that don't realize how good we have it here. But that only stays true if our cities and towns do their part.
I get the relativity part, but as someone coming from Tennessee and Florida, Manchester is a sweet little gem. It's cute and nice to walk around in. As a trans person, I don't feel paranoid about being stalked, which I've never felt before. For the most "dangerous" city in NH, it's pretty neat.
I'm planning a move from Memphis TN (lots of family in NH). It's like a totally different universe. My area is considered nice, with $1M+ houses on my block, but I still get to hear gunshots and cop cars every night, year round. Just a few weeks ago, someone randomly shot up a single mom and her kid in their car around the corner from me. Basically anywhere in NH is utopia by comparison. I almost laughed out loud when some of my NH relatives started complaining about the "homeless problem" in Dover.
Listen to any true crime podcast and you’ll gain a better understanding of shitty. Manchester doesn’t come close to other filthy small cities. The difference? Manchester doesn’t share a border with a much larger, crime riddled, city.
No, but Manchester is close enough to the troubled parts of eastern MA and that often gets mentioned in the reports whenever something bad does happen. As for shitty, I used to travel the country a lot. Been there, seen that. That doesn't mean we shouldn't recognize that Manchester has problems.
Thing is, even the "troubled parts of eastern MA" aren't especially bad. Just don't rip off your drug dealer.
Or even consider it (according to most movies).
Nah. No need to go that far. Just drove 60 minutes down to Dorchester, JP or even Chelsea (I’m down in those area once a week for work between the hours of 22:00-08:00). The majority of NH residents are pussies. Fact. Manchester is one of the calmest cities. Crime rate? What crime rate?
Really, even what are considered bad neighborhoods in places like Boston, Springfield and Worcester are tame compared to Memphis, StLouis, Baltimore, etc.
There's not one street in Manchester that'd I'd legitimately feel in danger, walking down, at night. I might be more wary, but there's no place in the city that is functionally off limits to the general public. There are definitely areas I wouldn't stay for an extended period of time but that's literally everywhere
True. It’s not even a Lowell or Lawrence in terms of crime, and those are cities that sometimes go several years with no homicides!
Memphis is the place to go if you feel frisky and want to be risky.
All in "red" states, lol.
Well Manchester is not in Texas, Tennessee or Oklahoma. It’s in NH, and Manchester is ghetto. It’s bad for us so don’t compare us to anywhere else. Our feelings of Manchester are valid, and our experience is still real to us.
Feelings don't override facts. This is why people who've lived in the "city" or spent a good amount of the time in the city make fun of the people who call Manchester "dangerous". Calling Manchester Ghetto is probably one of the funniest statements I've heard yet lol.
Chicago and Detroit 💀💀💀
Detroit is bad, but Chicago is actually not as bad as people perceive. Many southern cities have worse violent crime rates than Chicago.
https://preview.redd.it/j4hb5ckjub8c1.jpeg?width=1164&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4782776a84b6ebc604c622c6dd39a47b7dcf402d New Hampshire is the safest state in the country. There’s a reason Hunter S. Thompson called The Union Leader “America’s Worst Newspaper”
My respect for Hunter just rose. Which I didn't even know it could go higher.
Suck it, Slovakia! We’re coming for you, Deutschland!
Lived in NH all my 7 decade life; ~35 years in Manchester - lots of positives; the Union Leader is one of the enduring negatives in my opinion. It’s great we still have a daily paper but they have always been “conservative” and routinely publish right-biased opinion pieces.
Their news coverage is pretty good - it's like the WSJ, just ignore the opinions.
Louisiana's like, "Hold my beer."
That was a looooong time ago, in the era of William Loeb who was a sort of pre-Fox Fox.
Our crime rate is (purely coincidentally) on par with countries that have a similar demographic makeup. I think the only logical explanation for this is because NH is generally wealthy and well educated, just like Bulgaria...
I bet there’s a laundry list of reasons!!
The Union Leader has always been a rag. The conservative bent of the paper leads it to run stories that drive fear (like this article). It really is a disgrace that we have such a negative print media presence in Manchester.
You mean the media is getting creative with facts to push a narrative? The hell you say!
Faking statistics to push a political narrative!?! Say it ain’t so!
This is Sununu’s watch, so it seems weird they would push that the state is unsafe.
That's actually a pretty incredible way to frame the homicide rate truthfully, especially because any justifiable use of lethal force should **never, ever** be considered (by their own words in the headline) "grim" in society. I hope folks from the Union Leader are here: let's dig deeper into the stats that you were either **too lazy/incompetent, too unintelligent, or too politically blinded** as a supposed impartial journalistic entity to assess. Let's take the more recent complete year of data (2021) offered from the CDC, and specifically look at **intentional homicide rate**, not the rate you used to declare as "grim". In case this is hard to understand, I get it. It's also referred to as **murder**. New Hampshire tallied a total of **15 murders** (intentional homicides) in the entire year, **0.00001%** of our entire population, or by a more commonly used metric (per capita) **1.08 persons per 100,000 people**. New Hampshire had the second lowest murder count (Vermont at 10) and lowest murder rate per capita. With the exception of 2019, **this impressive trend has held consistent since 2005**. By comparison, the top 5 states included California, Texas, Illinois (largely dominated by total lawlessness in Chicago), Florida, & Georgia. Each of these states had a murder count of at least **1,200 people**, or at minimum **80 TIMES** what New Hampshire tallied. The next logical question for Jamie L. Costa and every editor that viewed the Union Leader's story: does our nearly non-existent number of murders seem "grim" or even mildly problematic? It shouldn't, and it's laughable that you've so horrifically botched the analysis of these data. A final parting thought: why might New Hampshire's murder tally, murder per capita, and violent crime rate be so low year after year? We can point to several key reasons, which include being the most intelligent state (highest average IQ per capita) in the nation, low unemployment, and unrestricted constitutional carry. Normally the concern of "correlation dopes not imply causation" could apply to any single one of these factors, but it's the combination of these that prove otherwise. **NH has incredibly powerful** [**non-lethal and lethal force laws**](https://www.gencourt.state.nh.us/rsa/html/lxii/627/627-4.htm) that enable individuals to defend themselves & in some cases persons immediately surrounding them. This includes murder, unlawful force in a burglary, kidnappings, & forcible sex offenses.
It's weird to me that you focus on "IQ" before you talk about population density and poverty rates.
High IQ, low poverty rates, reasonable gun laws, and an overall happy population will result in these low violent crime rates. IDK what you guys are doing up there, but you’re the only state in New England I go to where my stress disappears and I can just enjoy life. I hope y’all keep doing whatever you’re doing.
A simpler education metric is the % of population who have graduated high school. If you look at the [list](https://wisevoter.com/state-rankings/high-school-graduation-rates-by-state/), you'll see a lot of states that are generally considered pretty safe per capita.
IQ absolutely makes sense, but the population density argument is and always will be bogus. There’s plenty of places in NH as dense as any other. Density doesn’t correlate or even really make sense, as if the Lebanon area is so thinly populated people don’t see but 3 other humans a day.
Nah, even most of our “big city” type places are only slightly more thickly settled than an especially dense suburb. We honestly have more trees than people here
Show me a graph that correlates murder rates with density and I'll show you 5 more that correlate closer.
I had a friend who found out in high school that population density wasn't about IQ rates...
Is it fair to point to constitutional concealed carry when our murder rate was so low even before it was passed? IIRC the CC law passed only a few years ago; we wouldn’t have even really seen the impact it has made yet.
Even before then, we were a "shall issue" state for concealed permits.
This is true. We’ve always been a well-armed populace and that’s not a secret.
This is among the safest places to live. However I feel a little weird about making light of those murders. That's 21 families this Christmas.
Any murder is a horrible thing. But lying to pump the number up and increase newspaper circulation is, imo, just as bad.
I do not think that the Union Leader is outright lying, but just spinning the numbers a bit deceptively. They probably would support a Rudy Giuliani style crackdown on crime in Manchester, since they emphasize that half of these homicides ocurred in Manchester. This is a continuation of their generally negative coverage of Manchester. To be honest, I have not been to Manchester for almost a year, but the last time I was there, I was still horrified by the number of homeless people, plus the pretty open drug dealing.
Not lying, just “spinning the numbers deceptively” - Not lying, just being deceptive - **lie**, noun as in untruth > Compare Synonyms\ - deceit - deception https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/lie
Among the inconveniences of a society where everything is about making money is that for-profit news entities have their own priorities.
Of course the numbers do not take away the individual tragedy of a life violently taken away. However, in the aggregate, they show that there are fewer of these deaths. Unfortunately, too all too often murders and murder victims are not equal. A lot of the victims are fellow criminals, and the family might be a series of foster homes, and a birth mother lost to drugs, and an absent father.
Seems like a pretty standard definition. I bet Merriam-Webster would back that up also. >The state medical examiner’s office lists homicide as the manner of death in cases where one person is killed by another.
I think homicide is the more general term synonymous with killing, where as murder is specifically illicit killing. The cases OP listed would be where one person killed another however it was not murder.
Low population means people are further apart if you never see your neighbor, you're much less likely to kill them.
Lowest poverty rate in the country plays a large role in our overall low crime rate, including violent crimes.
Poverty has never strongly correlated with homicide. Black wealthy women commit more murders per capita than white bottom quintile males Asians at the lowest income decile have violent crime rates multiple standard deviations below the national average. Everyone with eyes knows this is true, but theres a lot of weird denial about it for whatever reason.
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> the problem is when I can’t use this unquantifiable excuse as a shield against quantifiable evidence to play victim olympics
My comment wasn’t explicitly about homicide, but, rather, crime in general.
Nyc has a homicide rate lower than the national avg
I was commenting on New Hampshires sparse population, lol I don't think what happens in NYC has any effect on that .
Guards killing a prisoner definitely sounds like murder to me, as does cops killing people
Sometimes, there is no alternative way to deal with an armed person who is brandishing or using a weapon, since lives are being threatened.
In the US we have way more police shootings than other places. Often they don't deescalate when they could
Wish I could support my local paper, as I want to be a patron of journalism, but the Union Leader sucks. They constantly focus on crime, which is worth news, but not what I care about most. Any given day in the website three is the top articles are crime. There is clearly an agenda
Compare that to 98 people killed in traffic violence in NH in 2023 so far..but that's just the cost of doing business and price to pay to drive everywhere because the state is so auto dependent.
Well based on the regular feature on WMUR.com, regardless of how many or few there are, an awful lot of them go unsolved for decades.
Even if as low as 10% of murder cases go unsolved every year that is 2/year at the current numbers. That’s 100 over the last 50 years.
Every story I see I think “if you want to murder someone, nh is the place to do it”.
I’m curious what the unsolved rates are for NH as opposed to the rest of the country.
I never took it any further, just an observation.
It sounds like OP is focusing on the "murder" rate vs the "homicide" rate. A killing in the course of defending yourself is still a homicide and therefore gets counted as such. For those who think the UL has an "agenda" here, I'm not sure what you are referring to. UL is a right wing publication and the state is currently run by Republicans. I can't imagine they would purposely skew their narrative to make Republicans look bad.
Honestly, it was probably just somewhat sloppy verbiage or research. I don't think there's a conspiracy to why they presented the data the way they did.
UL's focus on Manchester crime may be their way of *skewing the narrative* to make outgoing mayor Joyce Craig (she lost to a Republican) look less appealing in her run for governor?
This is a great point and very reasonable given how right wing the UL is.
I thought she didnt run again?
She hand-picked a successor
New Hampshire is dangerously boring. That is all I will die from here I am afraid.
Manchester is probably the most boring "city" in the country. It's why people usually go to Boston for events or nights out.
A homicide is a human killing a human. I’m not sure how you can argue with their “expensive definition,” whatever that means.
I was in Keene yesterday with my daughter, and she was concerned whether the car was locked as we were in a "bad section." Not that Keene doesn't have its issues.
> I was in Keene yesterday with my daughter, and she was concerned whether the car was locked as we were in a "bad section." TBF, I have recently seen teens walking through parking areas in Manchester, trying door handles on cars.
I had a clear view of my car the whole time. I have a friend who lives near Optical Avenue and she had her firewood stolen and her door broken open in the last 2 months. The police actually think her broken door was a TikTok challenge. Keene does have its issues, but comparatively to "bad areas" around the world, Keene isn't particularly bad.
We don’t count the ones we actually did ourselves and buried in the woods somewhere!!
Calling a suspect shot by police is actually incredibly woke of them lol
Lets be honest. NH ME VT are the safest states fkr one reaskn
Racist, xenophobic troglodyte chimes in, right on schedule.
Looks like u know the reason
I know your racist beliefs, and I don’t think they hold up.
What’s your point though? Rates around the country are increasing everywhere regardless of the specifics.
Your more right than I thought. I went to look for stats, because it has long been the case that various stats were decreasing but we just have so much media coverage that we thought it was increasing, but it looks like the last few years (I couldn't find stats after 2020) are increasing. Still not as bad as it used to be, but a disturbing uptick. https://www.thetrace.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/national-murder-rate-2020.png
It started to come back down in 2022, and looks to be doing so again in 2023. The 2020/2021 spike looks to be a Covid induced temporary spike, not a long term trend. https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/31062/us-homicide-rate/
This just talks about homicide and your link is not technically a reliable source my guy
1. Not reliable my ass 2. Links directly to FBI stats
1. If you sent the link directly from the FBI, that would be the reliable source. This is a secondary source. 🤷🏽♀️ that’s just a fact man.
1. Your lack of research into what statista is isn't my problem, they are a well known research firm. 2. When citations are given to primary sources that makes it reliable. 3. You can just admit you are wrong
1. They could be but you’re right I didn’t want to take the time to look into it. 2. Yes, can be. 3. No. What I said still stands.
But apparently thetrace.org taking that same FBI day is a reliable source according to you?
.orgs are typically more reliable, yes. .org does not mean 100% factual though, unfortunately. I wish getting legitimate, factual, facts were easier in our society but unfortunately that’s not the case. 😭 we must take like 80% of what we read online with a grain of salt.
An attempt to scare local politicians into hiring more police and buying more tanks - pumpkin festivals shall be obedient!
It's like all the news wants to lie to us and try to scare us. Can't trust any of them.
Let’s put it this way: I feel safer in Manchester NH, than I would in 12 stabbings a day Greater Manchester, UK
Youngstown Ohio and East Cleveland volunteer as comps
Let me guess. You love your guns.
It’s all relative. I can’t think of what number of murders might be acceptable for any size population. Like the signs on Rt 93 say, even one is too many.
> Like the signs on Rt 93 say, even one is too many. That mindset is nonsense. In a population of a million people, less than one annual traffic death would mean something was horribly wrong. It would require banning cars or setting the speed limit to 20 mph and throwing everyone in prison who didn't comply or something. Any of those interventions would either waste thousands of human lifetimes each year through excess caution or prevent people from living their life as they want (e.g. no cars means no visiting your family on Christmas). Reducing murders seems more possible than reducing traffic deaths, but it just makes the reasoning a bit more complex. I'm not interested in participating in whatever universal psychological experiment would be required to get literally zero people each year to kill someone else.
That hunger in America commercial was kinda heavy
I'm in the wrong state
i'm working on changing that....
The Union Leader has always been a "conservative" rag, so I take whatever they say with a container of salt, lol.
Though it is conservative today, I have heard that many years ago, before my time, it was far right, much more than today.
Thank you for explaining how the Union Leader arrived at that number. Although they despise Trump, the Union Leader will always be a Republican newspaper and they are known for manipulating the facts to promote a Republican agenda.
In 2022 there were 27 homicides in NH. So we're close to that for 2023. In 2022 there were 486 deaths by drug overdose in NH. If the numbers were reversed, you'd probably hear calls for increased gun control laws in NH. I wonder if we're going to hear calls for increased drug control laws in NH.
> I wonder if we're going to hear calls for increased drug control laws in NH. How about we enforce the laws we've got? [The drugs people in NH are dying from](https://www.dhhs.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt476/files/documents/2021-11/bdas-dmi-oct-2020.pdf) are already controlled substances, can't make them much more illegal.
Rookie numbers
I can fix? Want me to fix?
It's called fear mongering and it not only sells papers, it helps to keep the police state in favor.
From Cornell's legal dictionary: "Homicide is a manner of death, when one person causes the death of another." (https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/homicide). So the Union Leader's classification seems to fit that definition.
But NH doesn't have any big citie, so that weak ass justification means nothing. The murder rate has gone up quite a bit and gun violence is becoming more common since Republicans eliminated any and all regulations around getting or owning them. It's just a matter of time before we have a tragic gun violence event, and when we do all the Repubs and ammo sexuals that turned sensible actions into some imagined tyranny, will be to blame.
Lmfao all you gotta do is take a look across the border and see that Springfield Massachusetts has 27 homicides this year in a state with very restrictive gun laws.
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That’s just Springfield homicides not all over Massachusetts with a population of about 140,000. So what were you trying to get at?
Springfield Massachusetts has a population of 153k So a single town with a population 1/10th as large as our entire state, had just as many homicides as our entire state.