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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33394 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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Crime, and especially murder, is incredibly concentrated in specific areas of American cities. Unless there's another 115th North East Street right next to a 115th Terrace in Kansas City, the shootings appear to have occurred in the Nashua neighborhood south of Cunningham near the I435/Highway 169 Interchange. Nashua is ranked in the top ten safest neighborhoods in Kansas City, the 4th best to buy a home in and has a murder rate per 100,000 residents of 4.6 according to Niche.com, though they lump Nashua together with Gashland which is slightly further south.

Now that's a website designed to help people buy houses pick schools not represent crime statistics, maybe things have changed since whenever they got their data. Well here's a local news affiliate's map of homicides for each year. Notice how murders are overwhelmingly concentrated in the southern part of Kansas City. In 2023 they don't show any north of the Missouri River and Nashua is ten miles north of that. On the 2022 map I count seven murders north of the Missouri River within the I-435 loop, with most of them close to the river. The closest shooting to Nashua was two miles away and sounds like a domestic dispute (woman shot in her home after neighbors called cops due to disturbance, suspect immediately arrested). In the area bounded by I-435, 169 & 152 containing the Nashua neighborhood the KSHB homicide map shows a total of six murders since 2015. The Gas Station shooting you brought up was at East 35th & Prospect 20 miles south of where this shooting occurred.

Society was not collapsing around this guy, he lived in a safer than average neighborhood with good property values. Opinions can differ on whether or not it's reasonable for an octogenarian to arm himself before talking to a strange teenager at 10pm, but the old man's perception of threat should not reasonably have been based on the crime spike south of him.

How far away do the murders need to be before one's perception of threat can be based on them? Is it distance, does highway vs. city driving matter? Is it accessibility, can criminals ride public transit to murder you in your home?

Does it matter how long the murderous element have been murdering in the particularly murder prone areas of the city, temporal distance / proximity?

I can see on the map you linked that the murders seem to happen south of the river, if I were old enough to recall a time when these areas were less murderous, I might feel less secure than someone who has always known these areas to be murder enriched.

I'm not sure that being the 4th best neighborhood in the ~25th most violent crime laden city is a great comfort. The local MSM is evidently not portraying the local crime with enough context, it's not St. Louis, Baltimore or Detroit.

Yes, because the only way people ever get a sense of what the "good" and "bad" parts of town are is from GIS data and not by opening their window and noticing that they live in a beautiful neighborhood of detached single-family homes with carefully maintained lawns and not a graffiti-covered ghetto. Yes, he probably watched TV and local news with its inordinate focus on 'if it bleeds it leads" crime coverage. This horribly biased mainstream media may have misled him into thinking he was likely to be a victim of violent crime, and so he gunned down a black band geek (edit: in what would have been) the first murder in KC in 2023 to take place north of the Missouri River. Or he may have just been an addled old man who didn't consume much news and made a mistake.

Either way, the issue was not, as you asserted originally, that this guy watched society collapse around him. He may have watched society collapse on TV and become confused.

If it's anything like the area I left, you can tell which way the wind is blowing.

You show up to the area, fresh faced and optimistic. You quickly notice there is a street below which... well... you don't want to be there after night. You notice every time you drive by there, maybe to take a shortcut, somewhere along your route you notice someone being arrested. But it's fine! You don't live there!

But it's only like, 10 miles from you.

Three years in, the shopping center with the pizza place you used to love becomes... well... uncomfortable. More and more people are getting robbed in the parking lot. Sometimes a body shows up in the woods behind it.

But it's fine, that's still like, 5 miles from you.

4 more years go by. The corner gas station you fill up at starts getting hit every few months. People just walking into the street to stop your car and yell at you for money. Break ins are increasing. It's no longer safe to leave you car parked on the street. You complain about it, and people treat you like you should have known better than to live there. Often people who are like you were 10 years ago. Confident if they just live 5-10 miles north of where you are now, they'll be fine for the foreseeable future.

I put about 50 miles between myself and the problem this time around. It would be nice if that lasted until I'm 85. But I know I can't count on it. Every now and again some felons decide to take a felon vacation. It's like a normal vacation, only instead of going to the beach, they drive a county or two over and rob some house in the middle of nowhere for kicks. I guess even felons get bored and need to spice things up.

Yeah that's definitely a thing that can happen, but was that happening in Nashua? It doesn't look like murders we're spreading there, maybe you have some data about other crimes?

A lot starts happening before bodies begin appearing. Including people getting shot near you who don't die of their wounds. Because at the cusp of the tide is a zone that still has largely functional civil services. Like a hospital with an ER that's not crushingly overcapacity with trauma victims most nights.

One of the last straws in my old area was a guy who got shot in the parking lot next to mine, with the gunman on the loose. Came home to cops completely swarming the area. Technically not a murder though!

Oh yeah, I guess I spent too much time looking up crime data and missed Lester making a recovery. Glad to hear the kid survived and that the collapsed society this old man lives in hasn't had a murder this year!

I'll let you get back to inventing insults and not addressing my central argument.

Give it time. Eventually they too will bend the knee, can’t give any noticers ammunition

Do you live or spend time In a major city with crime and violence? I can say from experience that your comments ring true as of 5 to 10 years ago. Things are changing. And random violence: shootings, stabbing, and beatings have all increased over the last 3 years in what used to be safe an busy city neighborhoods and CBDs. Often times the victims are not caught up in risky behavior, just wrong place wrong time and specifically targeted.

Anecdotal fwiw

Not in the US, but know people who did/still do; apparently in the Bay Area, Asians are now intentionally running red lights because they get held at gunpoint and robbed during red lights?

Sounds absolutely wild to me.

I live in a city of roughly 500k with a murder rate 2.5x the national average and a reputation for meth. I feel very safe in the neighborhood of detached single family homes on the good side of the city I live in. There are areas of the city where I work that are pretty unsafe and I feel and behave very differently there but I know the difference.

I appreciate you sharing your experience but I'm pointing at maps of homicides from 2021, 2022, & 2023 where very few happen in or near Nashua and I don't think you can just shrug that off with "things feel different". Do we have some reason to expect the spatial distribution of stabbing and beatings would be very different from murder?

The person shot was from a different neighborhood.

Crime is not caused directly by geographical areas but by people whose ancestors came from different geographical areas (systemic racism).

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