It’s become more of a euphemism for bad areas/ghettos, but are there actually parts of some of our cities that are unsafe even in the middle of the day? Are there really areas where “the cops won’t go?”
I drove through Southeast DC once, and saw people fighting each other and throwing things at cars. I can’t imagine it would be safe to walk through on foot, and this was in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday.
Aren’t there places in LA that are pretty much gang-run states? Maybe it’s just the movies talking - I vaugely recall hearing when Training Day came out that the notorious housing project part of it was filmed in required permission from the resident gangs for the cameras.
Obviously I don’t know a thing about it; there are places here in town I wouldn’t choose to go to alone, but in broad daylight I don’t think I’d generally be in any actual danger. If I weren’t a small white female I might be even more willing to go there by day, just because I wouldn’t stand out as much. “Bad neighborhoods” here are extremely amateur compared to some of the places I’ve gotten lost near in DC.
L.A. has very few public housing projects. The few that do exist do have gang problems, but I doubt that that any of them have such a gang presence that you have to go ask some gang leader for permission to walk around.
A film crew is a different matter. They need to park trucks and store equipment around for several days. It was probably cheaper to pay off the gangs than to hire security to keep people from stealing it.
I doubt that any gang member is going to walk into a major Hollywood production and start shooting at Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke because they didn’t get a payoff. The police would not look kindly on this and they would be a getting a visit from a lot of LA’s finest.
In L.A., the more effective technique to combat gangs is to get court injunctions against them. A court will say that people in a certain area who are considered gang members can’t be seen in public gatherings in groups over a certain number. If they do, the police come by and arrest them for violating the court order.
Whether this is moral, ethical, or legal is not for us to decide here in GQ, but since the police have gotten these orders repeatedly, I would assume that the courts here agree that they are legal.
I would say this a resounding yes. New Orleans housing projects and other neighborhoods full of abandoned houses inhabited by squatters are definitely risky during the day. I’ve seen parts of DC and Baltimore also where I was glad there was no need to get out of the car. To contrast New Orleans with where I currently live in NC, I remember thinking the safety level must be much higher when I moved here b/c people in the housing projects had barbecues and lawn furniture on their patios. In New Orleans, things like that would be stolen, perhaps even just for scrap metal.
The risk may be lower for local residents, since they know people, could duck into a neighbor’s house if they sense trouble brewing, etc. But for a non-resident to walk through, they are risking mugging/robbery, assault, harassment, perhaps worse. As a small white woman I probably feel more at risk, but I’m not sure the actual risk is much greater. If I were larger and male there might be more potential for violence to escalate. For me, having to give up my purse and run seems more likely.
New Orleans’ Desire and Florida housing projects are the only places in the country that sprang to mind for me. I went to college in New Orleans and worked in a lab that required lots of dry ice. The dry ice supplier happened to be right next to the Florida housing projects. People in the lab weren’t allowed to pick up dry ice by themselves. It was usually me and this big cajun graduate student and even then I felt pretty uneasy. I don’t frighten easily at that kind of thing but that place was like a third-world country under anarchy.
Other parts of New Orleans can also be plenty dangerous during the day too.
I worked in a tough part of north St. Louis for about 15 years. I witnessed several street fights and saw a man chasing another with a tire iron. A coworker witnessed a shooting. One day, the smokers came in from the loading dock because they heard bullets hitting the building. This was all in broad daylight. Fortunately, I worked behind a pretty secure fence, and despite these stories, I didn’t feel too afraid about things - but I would not consider taking a walk outside without at least some friends around.
One day I was stopped on the way to work because the cops had just found a body in a dumpster nearby.
Naww…they were just TIRED and needed to sleep! You try looting & rioting for three days straight and see how exhausted YOU get. Besides, the riots pretty much ended on April 30th – welfare checks don’t get mailed until the 3rd of the month.
I’ve read some recent articles about the “Mogadishu-ization” of South Central L.A., how there are certain areas so dangerous and gang-ridden that the police don’t even dare to go down there. Of course I’d take everything the media says with a grain of salt, you know how they love to play up these kind of stories. I’ve been down there a few times and had no trouble at all (on major streets and in broad daylight, at least…night is a different story.) And I’m white as a blind man’s cane.
A few years ago I was taking a trip to New Orleans for a work conference, so I started checking out places on the web to find out where to go and what to see and such. More than one site said that if one wanted to see the graveyards, to only do so on tours escorted by police. The French Quarter and Riverwalk area was fine, but I don’t think I would’ve ventured too far away.
When I lived in Oakland CA, there was definitely areas to be avoided at all times, at least on foot. Even driving down High Street to get to the 580 Freeway was a bit nerve-wracking at times. Actually, Oakland always gets the bad rap, but there was areas just as nasty in Berkeley and San Pablo and all the other little cities in the area. Being young and poor, my wife and I lived in Berkeley on the border of an area charmingly known locally as “the crack triangle”. It was strange, but after awhile, the sound of gunfire in the surrounding blocks became as secondary and mundane as the noise of traffic on a busy street, such was the frequency with which it was heard. I wish I was exaggerating, but sadly I’m not.
The near west side and near south side of Chicago. Rather than nice areas with a couple small bad areas mixed in, it’s just the opposite.
One other theory: The rioting died down when the imposed curfew finally took hold.
This gets my vote as an unsafe area in the US, even in the middle of the day.
Desire is a thing of the past. There’s nothing left of it as of about a year ago. They’re cutting new streets through there and are going to be putting up row houses that kinda look like fancy townhouses. But they’re going to be government subsidized and will probably become ghetto within a few years.
The Florida projects have already been replaced by these townhouses and it already looks bad.
St. Thomas was torn down several years ago and they’re not replacing it.
I read a biography by an LA police officer, I forget the name but it may have been ‘protect and serve’ or something where the officer said that police couldn’t enter nickerson gardens without backup.
The movie deliverance was a good example of a place that was unsafe to walk through in the middle of the day, but they were technically in a canoe and it was a movie.
Entirely anecdotal, but I was once chided by an Oxnard, CA cop for having parked my Audi on a side street so I could duck into the Army-Navy store to buy a hat. He seemed to think I stood a good chance of mugged and/or murdered, or at least having my car stripped to the frame, while walking the fifty feet to or from the store. Somerthing similar happened one time when I made a recruiting trip to Temple University in Philly as well. Somehow I survived to tell both tales, such as they are.
I used to regularly drive through places like Chester and the near north side of Pittsburgh, PA and occasionally felt a bit nervous about it, but that was more from simply feeling out of place than from any clear sense of immediate danger.
I graduated from Tulane a mere ten years ago and I just assumed those things were going to be around forever. I guess a few people in government noticed that something wasn’t quite right in paradise too.
When I lived in New Orleans I worked for a few years for a children’s entertainment company, doing face painting, puppet shows, balloon animals, and costume characters at private parties.
We did parties in the projects and I always found the residents to be kind friendly people who had a far greater sense of community spirit than did the families in the rich neighborhoods.
They were always very welcoming hosts. These were the parties where we could be 100% certain to be well fed. Working for the rich white folks we often wouldn’t even be offered a slice of cake.
The way the projects were set up, we would usually have to walk across a courtyard or two past a few buildings from where we parked on the street. None of the residents ever made us white college kids feel unsafe.
This post is the first I’ve ever heard of police escorted tours. Whenever I had friends visit, we made our own self-guided tours of the St. Louis Cemeteries.
The great dangers of seedy New Orleans are known to very many people who have been told or have read that it is dangerous. This applies even to many of the locals who just know that everyone who steps into a black neighborhood gets shot in the face. :dubious:
Purd Werfect, if you didn’t venture past the Quarter and the Riverwalk you cheated yourself out of experiencing a great city.
The Riverwalk? :rolleyes:
I’m not sure what I did to earn the eye-rolling, but thanks for clearing up my ignorance about your city. I’m not surprised that a lot of reports are anecdotal and exaggerated.
As for missing out on a beautiful place, well, that would have been true of almost any town I flew into for a work conference and then immediately flew home afterwards. As it stood, I had a wonderful time there and loved what I did manage to see and experience.
An anecdote about my mother’s experience: In the late '80s, she got her first new car, and decided to drive it from Ontario, down through the states, to Florida. In Jacksonville, she took a wrong turn and got lost, in a run-down part of the city. She stopped to ask for directions, and the people drew her a map and told her to lock all her doors, don’t stop for anything and get out of the area ASAP, as it wasn’t safe for middle-aged white ladies in new cars to be driving around in that part of town. And they lived there!
Interesting.
Is this backed up by statistics? Because it’s always seemed to me to be intuitively true, but i never knew whether my feelings were correct or not. Here in Baltimore, the rate of on-the-street stick-ups in my area seems to rise considerably in the warmer summer months, and drop considerably when it’s cold and wet or snowy. This is just my own impression from sporadic reading of my university’s weekly security reports.
As for general safety, even in comparatively dangerous cities like Baltimore you are statistically very unlikely to suffer real harm unless you have some direct involvement with dangerous activities like the drug trade, or if you are unlucky enough to live in the areas where that trade is carried out. Baltimore had 278 homicides in 2004, and 246 of the victims were African American. The homicides were also concentrated in a few specific areas, especially parts of East Baltimore. And it’s not just the bad guys that get killed. Even the “worst” neighbourhoods have a very high proportion of people who are just trying to live their lives, and who get caught up in the violence. In fact, making an effort to improve your community can sometimes be the cause of your death, as Angela Dawson and her family found out in 2002.