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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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there were certain stops I was warned away from (maybe this was unfounded prejudice -- I didn't test them to find out)

The first relevant map I could find shows jumps in violent crime rate of as much as 5x between adjacent Chicago neighborhoods.

I've seen similar astonishingly sharp gradients in other cities... but I admit the idea of seeing a sharp gradient along a commuter train route is particularly shocking, and there seem to be a few of those here - Armour Square to Fuller Park?

The idea of "many criminals strike near home because they're too poor to have a car" always seemed a little bit odd to me, and they surely can't also be too poor to jump a turnstile, right? Is the real explanation a vicious/virtuous cycle of policing, where a criminal expects to be caught if preying on a "safe neighborhood", so they stay in the "unsafe neighborhood", which makes the job of the police on the "safe neighborhood" beat easier and makes them more likely to catch criminals who don't stay out?

Maybe there's some prosaic explanation, like "crime rates are normalized by residential population but people are being victimized in commercial areas that they commute to, so the numbers on that map have the wrong denominator".

The idea of "many criminals strike near home because they're too poor to have a car" always seemed a little bit odd to me, and they surely can't also be too poor to jump a turnstile, right? Is the real explanation a vicious/virtuous cycle of policing, where a criminal expects to be caught if preying on a "safe neighborhood", so they stay in the "unsafe neighborhood", which makes the job of the police on the "safe neighborhood" beat easier and makes them more likely to catch criminals who don't stay out?

This seems plausible. Among the South Side neighborhoods, there was the city worker neighborhood, where cops lived and were comfortable raising children and setting off (ostensibly illegal) fireworks on holidays, and repelled an attempted BLM protest. The cops were standing on the side of the street handing out recruitment fliers to people in their cars last I visited. And there are the other neighborhoods, where they're always investigating the last shooting, and there's barbed wire and metal detectors installed in the high schools. Presumably in the city worker neighborhood, if a person (especially a person who looked a certain way) were standing in a parking lot breaking into a car, someone would notice, call the cops, and those cops would come right away. In the other neighborhood they would not.

The idea of "many criminals strike near home because they're too poor to have a car" always seemed a little bit odd to me, and they surely can't also be too poor to jump a turnstile, right? Is the real explanation a vicious/virtuous cycle of policing, where a criminal expects to be caught if preying on a "safe neighborhood", so they stay in the "unsafe neighborhood", which makes the job of the police on the "safe neighborhood" beat easier and makes them more likely to catch criminals who don't stay out?

There's some of that, but there's also a huge factor of "most criminals are lazy and stupid". You hear more about those who are less so, but robbing one's neighbors is just a lot easier than striking out across town and robbing someone there.

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