Its not the average, its the distribution

From Let the Punishment Fit the Crime by Joseph M. Bessette.  The subheading is Punish less and crime will increase; punish more and it will decrease.  

One of Mangual’s recurring themes is how “hyper-concentrated” serious violent crime is in the United States—“both geographically (in small slices of metro areas) and demographically (among young, disproportionately Black and Latino males).” Although this is not news, the data are startling. In 2019, for example, the city of Chicago had a murder rate of 18.2 per 100,000 residents, more than three times the national rate of 5.0. But within Chicago, where the author moved for law school in 2012, the ten most violent communities, in which about a sixth of the city’s residents lived, had a murder rate of 61.7, over twelve times the national average. In one of these, the murder rate was a staggering 131.9. (This community, with 17,433 residents, had 23 murders—only two fewer that year than in the entire country of Norway with its population of 5.3 million.) Yet in this same city, 17 neighborhoods saw not a single murder … about a quarter of Chicagoans, living in a city infamous for its violent crime problem, reside in communities that, at least by the homicide measure, are much safer than the nation as a whole.