I was a visitor once, too. There's a reason I became a resident.
Off the top of my head, some of the largest cities in the South (assuming we aren't counting the southern part of the West Coast), are Houston, Phoenix, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, Jacksonville, Charlotte, Fort Worth, Atlanta, Memphis, St. Louis, Kansas City, and New Orleans. Their murder rates are 11.50, 9.55, 8.15, 12.48, 2.47, 12.18, 9.40, 8.02, 16.41, 27.73, 66.07, 30.93, and 39.50. As you can see, in that list, only liberal Austin has a lower murder rate than NYC's 3.39. Most of those cities have much higher murder rates -- nearly 20 times as high, in one case.
That's all the more remarkable when you look at how cities are defined differently. NYC is one of those big old eastern cities where the "city" is defined as just the core urban area, and so the crime stats don't get diluted with the stats from distant suburbs and surrounding rural areas, as happens with a lot of southern cities. For example, the population density of Austin and Houston are 3,182 and 3,660/sq mile, respectively, which is practically suburban, because they're each drawn with city lines that stretch way out into the boondocks. New York city, by comparison, has a population density of 27,751/square mile -- nearly eight times as dense as Austin. With NYC stats, you're looking just as the urban core, not the urban area, its wealthy suburbs, and distant rural areas. Yet, even zoomed in to focus just on the city itself, it's remarkably safe. Imagine what it would be if we were counting the multi-millionaire suburbs like Scarsdale and Greenwich. A third of the richest communities in America are NYC suburbs, but they don't count in NYC's stats, the way they would if its borders were drawn the way, say, Houston's are.
As a reminder, even property crime is unusually low in NYC. As for the tourists, most of them aren't traveling to the parts of NYC that generate most of the crime (poorer parts of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx). Mostly they come to wealthy Manhattan, where there's very little crime, and the worst you're likely to face is a pick-pocket. That said, I know there are tourists who feel unsafe in NYC simply because of the diversity. They see a lot of brown faces and hear countless languages and accents, as well as seeing ethnic attire, and they start to freak out -- they'd rather be in Nashville, Tulsa, or Dallas, where they feel safer, even if they're actually at much greater statistical danger.
