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Slight disagree on race not being a visible indicator. Its all about your immediate environ, and I can't tell whether someone was raised fatherless, but I can tell when someone doesn't belong, and race is the fastest and most statistically significant shorthand I had. A shit neighborhood with crime infesting it often is blacker, true, but in public desegregated spaces I found laying attention to isolated or 4+ groups of blacks to be optimal for barm minimization. It is precisely because black criminals are outside their local geographic bound that the racial element comes to the fore I will never go anywhere near Crown Heights of my own volition, so the black criminals there are a distant problem. Seeing a group of 4 black kids strut into the C train at Chambers is anomalous enough to immediately set off spidey senses. If they had a boombox it was Showtime, who were irritating for other reasons.
Crime stands out precisely because it is anomalous: MonkeyWithAMachinegun treats the miasma of everpresent crime as background noise to the city, and living in Bed-Dtuy made me think incidental misery was just par for the course. An extended period of crashing at a friends place in fucking Alphabet City made me realize that crime was NOT an everpresent feature, it is localized to lazy thugs who can't be bothered to stray out of their neighbourhoods and thats what makes their anomalous presence such a visible precursor to crime.
In the end I ended up getting into trouble with white criminals more often, but I treat that as statistical provenance: I curated my social environment to be as white/asian as possible, so obviously any stupid shit I encountered will be due to them. The statistical frequency for which my encountering black people lead to negative experiences for me was a much higher rate than with whites, even controlling for geographic accidents. I may nkt have been Die Hard 4 John McClane, but wearing a nice suit and shoes at the bad side of Prospect Park might as well have put a quest icon screaming 'LOOT GOBLIN' to the neighbourhood.
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