But more importantly, count me out when it comes to obsessing over crime rates or wanting to live in the "best" place for somesuch reason.

Bottom line, Durham's crime rates put it in the lousy company of Berkeley and Boston. Wait, what?

Still, the question of looking at crime ratings often misses broader context. And in this case, I'd argue, misses the point that there's more to a place to live than crime ratings, too.

To the TBJ's credit, the front-page animation announcing the story this morning gives more nuance to the treatment. ("Among other local towns, Raleigh fares better than Durham does, though both beat out the four N.C. municipalities ranked among the 100 most dangerous in the nation.")

But the story that the headline foreshadows doesn't exactly follow the path you might expect. And, it seems, there's more to what's happening here (both in the story, and not in it) than you'd guess from the splash.

Ahh, the headline. It's one way to draw people in to read your stories, especially when it gets blasted out in an afternoon news-brief from the TBJ. Hey, works for me; you bet I clicked on that story quickly.

Mandy Jones Hoyle over at the Triangle Business Journal is a terrific reporter, so I'm going to hope for a moment that this groaner of a headline came from a copy editor or someone else on the news staff:

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

First, the story itself.

If you read the headline -- which, in fairness, comes from the paper's "Triangle BizBlog," and thus is focused on our little area -- you'd get the reconfirmation every Caryite has front and center in their minds, which is that there's no way, no how you should ever go to Durham, where there is far too much crime.

Yes, Cary is the eighth-safest city in America. And Durham isn't.

And won't ever be.

Look, you need to have public safety and order in a city, or no one will want to live there, or will do so if they do only in very constrained ways.

But it's a bizarre leap to jump, as so many do, from the idea that a city has very low crime to the idea that you can't possibly live anywhere that doesn't rank as well as Cary.

There are literally people I've heard say they're afraid to go to Raleigh and stay in Cary because it's safer. (Raleigh: rated 236th in the US for crime levels, right around the average national crime level, and kudos to the city for that ranking.)

Well, imagine their fear going to Durham -- the (gasp!) 117th-most dangerous city in America.

Yet Durham doesn't do that badly compared to other cities in the state.

We're on par with Charlotte, and rank safer than Fayetteville, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, or Wilmington in those ratings.

Outside Raleigh/Cary, only High Point and Jacksonville do better in the ratings than Durham.

Stranger still when you look at cities that are more dangerous than Durham in the latest ratings, but at which no one ever seems to bat an eye:

Pueblo, Colorado. Huntsville, Ala., the ol' Rocket City. St. Paul, Minn. Berkeley, Cal. (Berkeley?)

Melbourne, Florida has more crime than Durham, and as an Orlando native, I thought the only violent crime in Melbourne came from senior citizens beating each other up over the last tube of Polident.

Boston, Mass. -- Boston, everyone's favorite safe big-city -- has more crime than Durham.

What's more interesting still is comparing Durham's numbers this year to past years. Durham's 117th-most-dangerous rating this year compares to a 98th-most-dangerous rating in 2009.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

But I'd like to move beyond the numbers and get to a more fundamental point on the matter, something not exactly related to the article but that's been on my mind of late.

I'm reminded of a colleague who's a Western Waker, and whom I needle when the opportunity arises about his seemingly pathological fear of Durham (despite having worked between central Durham and RTP for the entirety of his career.)

When I jokingly gave him a hard time about living in Cary the other day, he looked at me with a perfectly serious and rational face and said, "I don't know what you're talking about. Cary is the best place to live in the region."

I started to share that there's lots of terrific kinds of places to live, from ITB Raleigh to Durham City to beautiful rural areas of Durham, Orange and Chatham Co., but the answer I got back was black-and-white -- he didn't believe that, under any criteria or method of calculation, there could be any place better to live than Cary.

Of course, so much of that perception comes from the fact that so many criteria and methods of calculation are used, constantly, to rank cities, and in the numbers game Cary wins out on questions like crime.

But it wins out by its parts, not its whole.

That is, towns like Cary win out not because of what they are, but because of what they aren't: there's no industrial history, few to no long-settled residents, no economic winners or losers. They're lacunae, empty spaces that governments have allowed to be populated from the ground up with new subdivisions and stores.

And that attracts new residents who don't want history, don't want problems, simply want a chance to live among those who share their interests and socioeconomic station.

The rankings games that give weight to the Carys, the Sugar Lands, the Planos, the Westchester Counties -- they all essentially correlate back to giving approving nods to upscale communities where Bad Things Don't Happen, by which the horrible possibility that your perfect life might be affected by some random crime is, ipso facto, the Worst Thing Ever.

So when you become a top-ranked suburb like Cary, you start disproportionately attracting as residents people who are thrilled to live in a top-ranked community, and who'd only ever choose to live in a place that makes CNN Money's or US News' "best places" lists.

But is that really such a good thing?

Think back to the news this year that Durham was ranked the #1 place in America to retire. Remember all the commentary that showed up on the CNN Money site about that one? Much of it came from Wake'rs who said, in so many words, "No, this can't be true. Durham has high crime and is dangerous! Cary ranks best in the country and we have no crime. Come retire here instead!"

People, of course, can and should do what they want.

But I think there's a problem when a community becomes an aggregate of people attracted to it simply because they are looking to a ranking to find the place where they can have the "best life" for themselves and their own -- and when they've got a laser-light focus on hitting all the top-lists.

There's an American obsession for many in wanting to have the best schools, best parks, lowest crime, best property values return. Usually those conversations do not correlate with asking about the farmers markets. Or about how accepting the community is of those different from them. They do not ask about whether there is affordable housing, say, for a single parent trying to scrape by. (On the Triangle forum at City-Data, the suburbanites will sometimes suggest they try Durham. Riff-raff!)

We've looked here before at volunteerism rates, which plunged in "Raleigh" after Durham-Chapel Hill were cleaved off into their own MSA, bringing our eastern neighbors well below average.

Mind you, my assumption isn't that folks in Wake don't want to volunteer. As we noted here back then, my assumption is that Wake County has grown so fast with new residents that they aren't yet figuring out -- and may never do so -- ways to get deeply rooted in their new hometown.

They're simply moving to a new place that's the "best" town they can find -- and if they have to move again, they'll do so, to seek a new place to put down roots.

It's hard to end up here accidentally, and if you're easily swayed by water-cooler talk and crime fears -- though it is ironic when a fellow-traveler from Boston asks me about perceptions of high crime here -- you may not end up here at all.

To move with Durham is to move with purpose. And that's part of what I love about Durham -- as a result, I suspect, there's a sense of community here, an engagement across interest lines and neighborhoods, and plenty of interesting public and private spaces to do so in.

A visit to Fullsteam Brewery one night last week, for instance, saw a wide range of people out in force -- everyone from developers and investment bankers to non-profit backers to graphics designers to food bloggers to students -- to little kids running around.

All connecting with each other in this weird, fun Durham way, where a city of a quarter million people breaks down into lots of different cross-connected subcommunities, of which the West Durham/Fullsteam crowd is but one of dozens that exist.

That community comes about in large part because people for whom those kind of things matter seem to be more likely to pick Durham or Carrboro or parts of Raleigh than they are... well, than they are to pick more suburban places like Cary.

(And we've looked at this before on a different but related axis, that of urban vs. suburban proclivity, a measure on which Durham seems to draw disproportionately from urban cores while Wake may appeal more to the suburbs.)

My point is, different strokes for different folks.

But I, personally, would always be very wary about choosing to live in a place largely because Everyone Else wants to.

Not that my colleague will go along with me on this one.