Result of a More Robust Safety Net

I saw this tweet today by a British guy named Andrew Graystone, and was taken by the comparison it makes:

On an average day in the UK:

3,700 are forced to visit a food bank.
5,400 suffer domestic violence.
4,750 sleep rough on the streets.
4 migrants arrive in boats across the Channel.

Guess which one the government is calling a “crisis”?

His point is well-taken.

And not to take away from the people behind the statistics Andrew cites, but I wondered how those numbers compared to the same ones for the U.S., if down-scaled from our five-times-larger population. Here are my results. On an average day in the U.S.:

• 110,748 are food insecure (and probably visit a food shelf at some point each month)
• 5,479 suffer domestic violence — an amazingly similar number
• 110,748 are homeless, with an estimated 37,654 "sleeping rough" 
• 170 people attempt to cross the U.S. 2,000-mile-long southern border without documentation

I'm not totally sure the first and third items are completely apples to apples comparisons between the UK and U.S. stats, but I think it's fair to say we in the U.S. have a much bigger problem with hunger and homelessness than do the people of the UK, and good for them. The fact that domestic violence stats are so similar is interesting, and makes me wonder if any social scientists have examined that comparison.

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How I arrived at my numbers:

• I couldn't find stats on food-shelf use specifically (what they call food banks in the UK)... I'm presenting the number of people who are considered to be food insecure, provided by Feeding America, the network of 200 food banks and food shelves across the U.S., divided by 365 days and multiplied by .2 to equal the UK population size.
• The domestic violence number is drawn from the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence total number of incidents for 2017, again divided by 365 and multiplied by .2.
• The homeless figures are the number of homeless people every night in the U.S., drawn from the National Coalition to End Homelessness, and are again adjusted for population size.
• The number of people at the border comes from the 2017 Border Security Report from CBP, as reported on NPR, divided by 365 and adjusted for population size.