The poorest Americans today are victimized at about the same rate as the richest Americans were at the start of the 1990s

From Two Lessons of the Urban Crime Decline by Patrick Sharkey. Emphasis added.

For well-off urbanites, the decline of crime is most visible in sanitized, closely guarded city spaces where tourists and others can now comfortably wander about. But far more consequential have been the changes in low-income, highly segregated urban communities. Indeed, my research has shown that the most disadvantaged people have gained the most from the reduction in violent crime.

Start with the lives saved. Though homicide is not a common cause of death for most of the United States population, for African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34 it is the leading cause, which means that any change in the homicide rate has a disproportionate impact on them. The sociologist Michael Friedson and I calculated what the life expectancy would be today for blacks and whites had the homicide rate never shifted from its level in 1991. We found that the national decline in the homicide rate since then has increased the life expectancy of black men by roughly nine months.

That figure may not seem like much, but it is exceedingly rare for any change in society to generate such a degree of change in life expectancy. For example, researchers have estimated that if the obesity epidemic in the United States was eliminated, life expectancy would increase by a similar amount. The drop in homicides is probably the most important development in the health of black men in the past several decades.

The decline in violence on city streets also occurred inside public schools, creating environments where students could learn without fear of being victimized. Analyzing statewide tests of academic achievement, I found that test scores have risen the most, and the gap in the average scores of black and white children has narrowed the most, in those areas where violence has fallen most sharply.

The drop in violent crime has led better-off families to move into poorer city neighborhoods, thus reducing the concentration of poverty in urban America. Though gentrification has become a problem in a few prominent places, in most cities there is no good evidence that poor families have been pushed out of their neighborhoods as violence has fallen. In fact, as research I conducted with the doctoral student Gerard Torrats-Espinosa shows, the crime decline has improved the prospects for upward mobility for the poorest American families.

The everyday lived experience of urban poverty has also been transformed. Analyzing rates of violent victimization over time, I found that the poorest Americans today are victimized at about the same rate as the richest Americans were at the start of the 1990s. That means that a poor, unemployed city resident walking the streets of an average city today has about the same chance of being robbed, beaten up, stabbed or shot as a well-off urbanite in 1993. Living in poverty used to mean living with the constant threat of violence. In most of the country, that is no longer true.