"London has more muggings than San Salvador" - in raw numbers, you're probably right...but when it comes to the RATE - which is far more important than the raw numbers - you're almost certainly very wrong. If a town of 10,000 has two murders, and a city of 10,000,000 has 500 murders, the city of 10M is
four times safer than that town of 10,000...meaning that the people in that small town are four times more likely to be murdered than in that city of 10M.
That's why it's crucial to pay attention to the RATE and not simply look at the raw numbers.
Also, when it comes to NYC, perhaps you should reread what I wrote - when I said that NYC has just over half the homicide rate of the state of Louisiana, that's another way of saying that NYC is about twice as SAFE as Louisiana...that one is almost twice as likely to be murdered in Louisiana than in NYC. I've pointed out many times on DP how safe NYC is compared to many other places in America.
Concerning Marseilles, I'm not at all impressed, much less concerned. The corruption you describe is small potatoes indeed compared to most of the third world. Overseas, I've paid off cops several times, and even paid off a judge to get my brother in law out of jail - try doing that in America sometime! But back to Marseilles,
it's about as dangerous as New York City (which isn't that dangerous, as you yourself admit):
Marseille, with its population of 800,000, has nearly as many drug-related murders proportionally as New York City, with a population 10 times higher.
Pay attention to the bolded word: "proportionally". If anything, instead of telling you that Marseilles isn't that bad, this should be an indication of just how bad America is, since NYC is one of our safest big cities. Again, it's the RATE and not the raw numbers which is what's important.
One last thing: always use "Reply with quote"...because otherwise, I probably won't see your reply. Oh, and unless you're also retired military, please stop making assumptions about what I did or didn't do overseas, for (again, unless you're retired military) it's VERY unlikely you have any clue about what I did or did not do overseas.