In 1980s Los Angeles, a bank was robbed every hour (2019)

For example Eastern European countries generally have moderate to low inequality levels and low GDP per capita. South American countries have high to verify high inequality and comparable GDPs per capita. Eastern Europe is much safer statistically than South America.

Ignore this at your own peril...

Mainly because you won't be there when it happens when it happens, but would you feel the same if you felt earthquakes, nuclear effluence spikes, droughts or landslides from the few times it rained, plus all the aforementioned calamity? It's a visceral feeling that you carry with you for the rest of your Life, and it manifests in different ways depending on the person one of the most prevalent being depression and anxiety as I've seen far too many succumb to alcholism, drug abuse and SSRIs just to cope with the antipathy and eventually apathy towards World around them.

That's what I (and many more like me endured in that period in CA) saw and lived while I lived there until my early 20s, so we adapted (as I'm multi-generational) and I personally sought to apply my skill-set to what I felt had the best chance of ensuring we as a Species transitioned to a sustainable system that spanned: Renewable and sustainable Ag, Farm to table seasonal cuisine, Energy (solar), EV, Currency/Monetary system (Bitcoin) and then I got stupidly ambitious and almost made it to SpaceX this year.

Again, you can take your placid (in my view monotonous and short sighted) and insular existence but the truth is I always wanted to live my young adult Life this way and I have inspired more to pick up where I left off. I wanted what I went through to be for something in order to be a part of something that helps us transition out of this horrid system that has devastated our ecosystem and now looking back on it all I know I did something right.

It wasn't presented as a counterexample, it was presented as grounds for doubting the mechanism for the effect you describe.

Increased danger -> increased perceived danger -> behavior which attempts to mitigate danger is a nice theory, but it relies on deltas in perceived danger corresponding to deltas in actual danger.

If deltas in perceived danger that manifestly do drive behavior are driven by processes that are independent of actual danger, your argument no longer makes sense.

The Vox link you previously posted shows the large spike (+~30%) being 2020 related.

The 21.8/100k you cite for St Louis in 2003 was also abnormally and suspiciously low, as 2002 and 2004 were in the 30s/100k. I wouldn't baseline anything off a single local outlier that's 50% off from other years. Perhaps a statistical / data collection anomaly? You can see in 2004 the rate was about 35/100k, while in 2013 it was 38/100k, a scant change.

You can see that data in context within a chart in this NYT article from 2015 [2] which discusses some possible factors in St Louis' persistently high crime. 2014 and onwards is likely skewed considerably by the Ferguson unrest, and it sounds like St Louis might still be dealing with that alongside other factors.

Outside the local context, none of this data at a macro scale looks like the trend we see in the 70s-80s that the lead-crime hypothesis seeks to describe though. Crime nationwide has indeed been growing slightly since 2015... to hypothesize about why we're seeing this, I'd guess it's largely due to loss of opportunity and rising income inequality leading to poverty and desperation, which our recent economic policies have only been worsening. But I'm absolutely no expert in the subject, just trying to figure things out like you are.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/murd...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/11/us/st-louis-puzzles-over-...

No, mainly because I lived in Switzerland and they have a long history of warfare and starvation as well; most don't realize the Swiss Pikemen/Mercenaries were the best of the Western World and were recruited for many other foreign militaries.

They were so well known for this craft in warfare that they still guard the Vatican to this day. Furthermore, up until WWII Switzerland has been a poor, mainly agrarian civilization that lived hand-to-mouth and were mainly made of of hardy, tough 'mountain folk' until the 19th Century. I lived in the Bernese Swiss alps in what I called my 'unabomber shack' during the Spring and Summer to prepare to move the cows up the Alps that only had a small oven, no running water, no electricity and no insulation. All it really was is just a single room attached to a barn; it was built really well and had been there for over a 100 years old, no one knew for sure, but what struck me is that this is how entire multi-generational families lived for centuries there. There were no lofty lives as Welles, and many like to think, for the majority of Swiss History until recently, and now youth suicide is a massive issue there, but I won't get into that now.

Orson Welles, like so many who have only read or stayed for short visits, took a very ignorant and narrow view of Swiss History if really believed that. I also lived in Italy which I could go even further in depth about, too.