This is kind of like when I went to prom, except it was drinking Old Milwaukee Light while driving around to nowhere in particular.
My in-laws are under tremendous stress right now, so I don't really argue the point, but they keep asking if perfectly ordinary things are safe.
Tell them no, drinking Old Milwaukee Light while driving around to nowhere in particular is not that safe.
Before the link rotted it showed Milwaukee among the 50 most violent cities in the world. Top half, IIRC. None of which is to say OP is wrong about this particular excursion, but is very much to say that US violent crime isn't just a fantasy, and pretending it is is a folly.
They are asking if it's safe to be in the nicer parts of Pittsburgh in the morning.
4: I'm pretty sure that a bunch of white teenagers at the library during the day are not at high risk of violence.
4: it seems to have dropped out of the list this year; St Louis, Baltimore, Detroit and New Orleans are still in, as are Joburg and Cape Town. All the rest of the top 50 are Latin American cities.
Yes, local news is a fearmongering cancer, and it'll get worse because because that's the cheap way to make a show that has good ratings.
I have similar conversations with my mom when I visit, she think the L is dangerous now.
What seems new are a) the huge packs of kids that either choose an intersection to pull donuts and carouse or occasionally swarm a store and run off with the merchandise. Also b) much bigger homeless populations in a lot of cities-- not crime exactly, but aggressive begging gets old fast.
is very much to say that US violent crime isn't just a fantasy
Good think no one said that! Christ.
Apparently, Milwaukee is the capital of stealing Kia and Hyundai cars. I don't know if they hate Korea or just decided their cars are fun.
10: We're hearing about that nationwide - some new hacks are going around. (Police press releases are calling it a "TikTok challenge" but that makes it sound like all the social-media-panic-hoaxes like the knockout game; I assume most of the people using the hacks were already doing car crime.)
11. Apparently (local cop tells me) the technical competence needed to steal a Kia is now much lower than for other cars. Nearly the screwdriver trick that used to work on old Fords, but with a USB cable.
I'm not sure. It seems to be easy enough to steal some models that people who wouldn't otherwise steal are doing so. On the other hand, the police said too watch out for people passing out edibles on Halloween and that was just crushingly wrong.
There was a strange story a while back out of NZ where cars were being stolen because NZ isn't a big enough market for people to sell cars specifically for it, and so they were getting lots of cars made in Japan for the Japanese market which means they have basically no anti-theft protections at all because theft vanishingly rare in Japan.
A lovely webcomic from back in the day, recompiling from memory:
10:05: I do not know how to hotwire a car.
10:07: I know how to hotwire any American car built before 1995.
(later)
"I can't find my keys! Do you see them anywhere"
"Are they on this 'Fuck the Whales' keychain?"
"No!"
"Well, what do they look like?
"A screwdriver and a pair of pliers."
I have a judgmental theory that the new parental default for safety is 'at home, online' and anything with any risk higher than that seems comparatively unsafe.
I have a theory that local news is owned by billionaires who don't want to pay taxes and they exploit various fears in their reporting to further political causes to help that.
It's local primary election season, so here's some crime.
I just received a text from my mother-in-law warning me that if I hear a baby crying outside at night, don't open the door, because serial killers are pretending to be babies in order to trick women into letting them into their homes.
As near as I can tell every warning about a Tiktok challenge has been 90% Gen X passing along chain emails like if they break the chain they'd die in two weeks.
I read that cats rarely kill human babies.
YES. THAT'S RIGHT. JUST KEEP LISTENING TO THAT LITTLE FUNGUS IN YOUR EAR.
I'll sorta-kinda take the other side on this one. I don't disagree about local news, or about this particular case, and maybe I'm misreading the vibe (not here, but everywhere) that if you're worried about crime, you're a Fox-poisoned crypto (or outright) racist, but the level of violence (particularly gun violence) that is normalized or brushed off is pretty nuts in this country. I feel like we all know this when it's about school shootings, but give it less thought when it's about urban violence. The number of carjackings and armed robberies it takes in the places I frequent for me to think twice about going to those places is very low! (Maybe this makes me a good suburbanite.) It takes precisely one video like this, which has been playing on a loop in Chicago, and happened in a nice part of town, to make people freak the fuck out, and I don't actually blame them. It's terrifying and unacceptable! (Now, obviously I'm much more aligned with the new mayor, who talks about reinvestment instead of a police crackdown, but it's a real problem.)
I live in a suburb. My 10-year-old is an explorer and rode his bike a few miles away to a busy strip mall last week. The next day, there was an armed robbery across the street from there. That's terrifying and unacceptable!
I know people tend to point to falling crime stats, and contextualize the numbers historically, but the baseline of violence in America is just really damn high, and it is 100% of the time a losing proposition to poohpooh people's anxiety about their physical safety.
I don't think it's fair to accuse your son of casing the joint for the robbery, if that's what you're doing.
I mean, from what I remember about his youngest....
I'm pretty sanguine about personal safety, but I think ogged is right that there's developed a lefty conversation around crime that's bonkers--recall a month or two ago where people were acting as if you'd have to be a Nazi to disapprove of people smoking meth on a train, or wanting anything done about it.
I don't think those idiots were precisely representative, but I do think they're on a spectrum with what is a much more typical attitude towards any enforcement around low level crime, eg fare-jumping. It can be simultaneously true that the MTA expends excessive resources on preventing anyone riding the subway for free and that the correct amount of resources isn't zero. Just like it's true both that crime is way, way down from what we all grew up with and that US crime rates are unacceptably high. See 14.last.
Anyway, crime is real and crime is bad and, ceteris paribus, we should try to fix things.
What turns into poohpoohing is that the way people react to worries about "crime" is so counterproductive in terms of their actual safety. Say what you like about Chicago, NYC is an important symbol of dangerous street crime to the rest of the country, and people from less dense and urban areas with much higher crime rates than NYC still think of NYC as the dangerous place.
The thing about crime is that what matters is the odds of it happening to you, not the distance away from it happening to someone else. I'm sure I've been within a half-mile of more crime than most people, because I've spent my life within a half-mile of a whole lot more people than most people. This hasn't meant that I personally was in any more danger than anyone else.
Likewise in terms of counterproductiveness, having your own gun isn't going to make you safer in any plausible narrative about actual crime. So the left wing response to "crime is bad and so I need a gun to protect myself" is "Jesus Christ you're too stupid to breathe" (undiplomatic, I know, and hopefully usually not said explicitly). The wild stupidity in that statement is "so I need a gun", but when so many people who are "worried about crime" are stupid like that, it's hard not to categorize the worries themselves as stupid.
Right, I've lived in Harlem and in Berkeley, and Berkeley is unsafe in ways that Harlem simply isn't. As LB says you have to discount distance, there were at least two shootings within a couple blocks of my while I lived in NYC, but per capita it was really safe. And it felt safer too because you're so rarely alone and everything is well-lit.
I had a friend visiting from Yale and we were walking back through Morningside Park and he was headed back up to Morningside Heights later in the evening for a concert and so wanted to ask me if it was safe to be in the park at night. And I started saying like "well, I can't tell you what you'll be comfortable with, is it one in a million or one in a hundred thousand chance something bad happens..." and he said "oh, then it's fine, in New Haven there's places it'd be like one in three." And I looked it up afterwards and New Haven had as many murders as all of Manhattan.
Manhattan is a pretty small island.
Like I think more crime has happened to me personally (one mugging, one smash and grab) in Berkeley than to all the people I knew in NYC while I was there total. And that's not even getting into things like when people showed up at a coffee shop I frequented (but wasn't at) with large guns and stole like 50 laptops.
And not even New Haven or Berkeley -- if we're looking at violent crime per capita rather than per square mile, rural Alabama stacks up pretty badly against Chicago. (I haven't actually checked. Working on vague memories here).
6: I just went to a Memorial service for a beloved English teacher, so I was just thinking about high school. At my high school (prep school), they might have been, because some of the boys were real bullies. I remember before I graduated that a couple of the librarians said to me that they liked me, but they were glad my class was graduating, because there were a couple of boys who terrorized everybody with stupid pranks. Probably the worst stuff happened in the dorms.
Yeah, I wonder how the Southernization of the rural Midwest is going to change violence rates. My impression is that the rural and suburban midwest used to not have a lot of violence problems the way that the south does, but as it's gotten Trumpy here I expect there's a lot more non-hunting guns around...
32: New Haven permanently reset my "is it safe?"-ometer. And I didn't have a problem personally the entire time I lived there (except for the time some drunk-looking type tried to follow me home so I stopped off at the Irish bar with the union guys which neatly solved that crisis.) Now I'm old and don't leave the house except to work and also Ogden is very safe despite its local reputation.
The rural Midwest was not non-violent in my experience. It was non-murdery (which was nice). Violence that would get a city kid arrested was not punished by the legal system.
it is 100% of the time a losing proposition to poohpooh people's anxiety about their physical safety
...and yet, it is also 100% unalterable human nature to make fun of scaredy cats, so the derision will never disappear. I wandered aimlessly around Milwaukee taking pictures in summer 2004, as part of saying good-bye to my home state and because I remembered vaguely liking the city's energy on visits in high school (mostly to the art museum), and I felt perfectly safe the entire time; I have no idea what that would be like 20 years later, but the sense of decline is pretty profound. (To be fair, I am kind of an idiot and took risks in Chicago, to the point where a cabbie once pulled over on 55th street and picked me up, drove me back to my apartment, and lectured me the whole time about how I really, really shouldn't have been walking back from the red line at night. I think I paid him.)
I always read Ogden as Ogaden, which I'm sure leaves me with an unfair impression of the calocale.
Though in terms of genocides per unit area maybe Ogden comes out ahead!
I did just check, and for 2019 (the year I found stats for) the murder rate in Chicago was a little more than double the rate for the entire state of Alabama, so my specific point does not stand unless you cut me a lot of slack on "pretty badly". But the general point that people react to density and integration as if they implied danger stands.
I should maybe add that I'm very, very pessimistic about violence in the US.
I walked all around Chicago on a Sunday afternoon, because the alternative was paying hundreds of dollars to see "Hamilton." There were a couple of unnerving points, but nothing bad happened. And I got to see "Hamilton" for $10 a few years later.
It turns out "Hamilton" is pretty good.
I'm still upset those museum fuckers loaned out American Gothic like I wasn't going to a museum just to see that.
Chicago has the problem that part of it is Indiana, so you can gets guns very easily relative to most large cities.
I'm still upset those museum fuckers loaned out American Gothic like I wasn't going to a museum just to see that.
Yeah, they should just close the Art Institute when they loan out "American Gothic;" it's not like there's anything else to see there.
They did have the painting from Ferris Buller.
I wondered if New Berlin West was the Nazi-salute-yearbook-photo-hyuck-hyuck Wisconsin high school, so I looked it up and oops, that was Baraboo. New Berlin West had a different Nazi controversy. Must be something in the cheese curds up there.
38 I lived in New Haven in the late 90s early 00s and never felt unsafe. But I spent most of the 80s on the LES so YMMV. A few years ago I spent a few weeks in Athens (half conference followed by a vacation) and was so alarmed by all the graffiti I saw I called a Greek friend who grew up there if I had to be worried about being mugged. Answer: no.
This thread needs more people who couldn't get into Yale.
Oh hey, it was incredibly easy to find information about a sentimental favorite from the permanent collection. The ghost dog!
57 does grad school count? I went to a state school for my undergrad.
Incidentally, it's pronounced "New BER-lin" to rhyme with curlin', and not to be confused with Berlin, WI, which also rhymes with curlin'. I was telling lourdes this morning that I'm really starting to lose interest in Wisconsin as time goes on. I just don't feel any personal connection to stories like this anymore. To 55, though, I think the cheese curds may be a red herring.
I've never been to New Haven, but I went to brunch in Stamford. So I'm pretty much an expert in Connecticut.
However, there is now a law requiring all schools in Wisconsin to teach students about the Holocaust. (Helpful tip: if you are organizing a presentation to middle school students by a centenarian Holocaust survivor, please do not tell the students beforehand that they "are in for a real treat," unless you actually live for that special moment when an 11-year-old Jewish kid asks "wait, what's a crematorium?")
57: I forgot I'm officially a Yale reject. Yale is wise.
I sat next to a future Eli at my high school graduation. Does that count?
I am definitely sure Yale would have rejected me if I'd given them the chance.
65: Me, too. But I spent a week in New Haven in 1977 visiting my brother who was a grad student at Yale. It seemed perfectly safe to 14-year old peep.
I was rejected by Yale. I'm not particularly upset about it though.
67: Yes, it's good that Unfogged has some Ivy League diversity.
About a decade ago, Yale went into lockdown because someone phoned in a warning that someone they knew had threatened to do something like a campus shooting. That led to an increased police presence and then a different person reported seeing someone with an assault rifle on a rooftop, which triggered the lockdown.
Eventually a new story emerged that the original threat was pretty vague* and maybe not serious, and that it was very likely that the "gunman" on the roof was actually part of the increased police presence. Probably a couple of hours were spent with police and administrators just trying to figure out how cancel the lockdown without getting into trouble if there really was a gunman.
Meanwhile, people who'd lived in New Haven when crime was much higher were saying things like "If we had a lockdown every time someone was spotted with a gun near campus when I was there, we'd never have been able to go out."
*And maybe not even a threat in the sense of targeting anyone or group in particular.
Anyway, I rejected Yale twice. I trust that they won't make me reject them a third time.
This thread needs more people who couldn't get into Yale.
Back when I was applying for universities, Yale not only didn't offer me a place, they never even had the courtesy to write me a note saying they weren't going to offer me a place, possibly because I didn't actually apply.
I did apply to, and got an offer from, the British equivalent of Yale (Stirling).
My brother got held up when he was a student at Yale by someone threatening to have a gun. So HE threatened to have a gun.
The guy ran away.
It wasn't a big deal to him. He just thought it was funny because he was a bit drunk and it gave hiim the courage. I guess the benefit of growing up in a red state is he'd already been SHOT AT so maybe someone threatening him with a gun was something he could take in stride? Though when I was held up by someone with a gun I found it extremely terrifying.
I've never been shot at. I do know two people who accidentally shot themselves in the foot in a non-metaphorical way.
I rejected Yale so much I didn't even apply there.
What turns into poohpoohing is that the way people react to worries about "crime" is so counterproductive in terms of their actual safety.
Right. And one of the key reasons for this is that concerns about "crime" are often not rooted in facts, but are instead an expression of racism.
My overtly racist brother was aghast (and his overtly racist kids were condescending and amused) when I chose to move to a place where the schools were majority minority. The schools were fine.
I remember discussing with my racist nephew the fact that he would no longer go to the shopping mall near where I live because there had been a shooting there. I have gone to this mall at least weekly for 10 years, and have never felt unsafe. And there are shootings at his preferred white-people mall, too.
People get shot a lot in this country, and the racists who worry so much about "crime" are often the ones most opposed to doing something about it.
a month or two ago where people were acting as if you'd have to be a Nazi to disapprove of people smoking meth on a train, or wanting anything done about it.
I am aware of all internet traditions, and can usually be counted on to at least be aware of stupid online conversations, but I missed this one.
It turns out you can google "meth train" and get this. And yeah, I gotta say, the whole meth/fentanyl contact high narrative described here seems as frivolous as the narrative about how public libraries aren't safe because they are in the city. Is there something I'm missing?
On the other hand, if we're talking about the crystal meth train, that's a different story.
I thought I'd been hearing the Cat Steven's song all wrong. Wouldn't be the first time.
76: my kids' school is majority/minority and title 1 and people act like it's in a war zone. Sir, this is a kindergarten.