I have lived in europe for years and only recently returned to the US. My former boss and other friends took many trips together. He said this of me in Amsterdam…that he was impressed that i would often go off on my own in a strange city just to look around. I did that whern we went to Dublin…which was great by the way.
Out of all the places I have been Dublin is one of my favorites. The people were very nice and friendly. amsterdam was the same. The people I met were great. I’m sure there are bad places in any city or town anywhere, but I guess I’ve been lucky wandering around numerous german cities, and cities in Spain and France. For the most part people were always nice to me (and I expected the worst being an american black guy).
I have been in a few places in the US that were scary-to-the-point-of-feeling-palpable-danger. They include Oakland, San Francisco, parts of South Los Angeles (we aren’t allowed to call it South Central anymore), above about 120th St in Manhattan, and Santa Ana, CA, where I used to pick up on streets that were nothing but lines of drug dealer hawking goods LOUDLY to passing cars. I went into one of the houses once, and thought I might actually not be able to leave.
Oh, and Baltimore is kind of icky.
I have never felt unsafe in the UK or Ireland, and even Barcelona wasn’t bad.
I think there is a big generational component when it comes to the perception of how safe American cities are. Not all by any means, but a large portion of the Baby Boomer generation has a hysterical aversion to cities. As a kid (early 90’s) I had to beg my Dad to take me to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, which he didn’t want to go to because it was a “bad neighborhood.” Even today he is still skeptical about going to Manhattan and I don’t think a poor person can even afford to breathe in Manhattan anymore. In fairness to their generation, cities were worse during their formative years, as evidenced by the link up-thread.
Personally, right out of college I was a teacher in a pretty bad neighborhood and never felt particularly concerned for my safety. As mentioned, most of the violence is gang related; if you aren’t involved nobody really cares about you. Then again, there certainly are parts of most cities where I wouldn’t go if didn’t have to. But I could say the same about some European cities I’ve been to like Liverpool or Catania/Messina. Is one of them worse? I’d imagine American ones may be slightly worse due to the presence of guns, but I provide no evidence whatsoever to back that up.
Your link is showing the absolute worst parts of the city, and there was a period in those years when NYC’s economy was uncharacteristically depressed.
I lived and worked in Manhattan during most of those years, and often worked various night shifts. I walked to and from work at all hours of the night, and never once got mugged. Sure, there were a few scares, but not many.
Now, in Cleveland, even in the worst areas, I think I’d be in more danger of being obviously gay than being obviously white.
The UK simply does not have large areas like that and due to our Thatcherite embrace of voodoo economics and the subsequent rise in poverty, homelessness etc we’re probably closest to the US in this regard.
There are housing estates where drug-related gun crime is high but we simply do not have large no-go areas.
I grew up in southwest Atlanta and did a five-year-stint in Newark, NJ. I’m a non-threatening woman and I’ve never been mugged or raped or killed.
I was just telling someone this the other day: Everyone else’s bad neighborhood always seems worse than yours. After my father dropped me off in Newark for graduate school, he told me he was scared for me. “You’re living in the slums!” he said, forgetting that I had been raised in an area just a half-step up from ghetto. But his eyes were accostomed to what a bad neighborhood looks like in the South versus the Northeast. In Atlanta, even the bad areas have trees and lovely parks and quaint houses that aren’t caged up in burgular bars. But these features were missing in Newark and replaced with gutted warehouses and ugly boarded-up row houses. Because of the higher density of people crammed together, litter was also a bigger eyesore. So of course it looked scarier.
I have no idea if US’s bad parts are worse or better than the UK’s. But perceptions do play a role.
Only three? I used to babysit for my uncle. he lived in Michael’s Estate in Inchcore in Dublin. It was a high rise development. There were at least 5 stolen cars flying around the estate every night, sometimes they were chased by the police but this was a rare event as the cop cars were sometimes petrol bombed when they entered the estate.
To get to my uncles apartment i had to step over a lot of heroin junkies in the stair well as I never used the lift because of the smell. Dublin back in those days had a larger heroin problem than NY(per capita).
There aren’t really any area in Dublin I wouldn’t go but I’d accept that I was at considerably more risk in some places than others.
The race thing is an interesting one. As a white chick, during the daytime I feel safer than a black person in areas with lots of black gang violence. I’m far less likely to be mistaken for a person from a rival gang, even if I’m wearing the wrong colors or carrying the wrong handbag or whatever. So in that sort of situation, I feel safer for being white - North Side Chicago gangs are mostly Black and Hispanic, and I’m clearly neither.
Being in an unfamiliar [ethnic] neighborhood, however, my skin and blond hair do make me more noticeable as an outsider, though, and I feel like that does put me at a higher risk for mugging or rape. (Note: this is about feeling and perception, not reality; I *feel *like someone would rather assault a person with no obvious local connections than the girl who might be the cousin of Mike from down the street.) I think the best response to that situation is to walk with purpose, not look lost, and look like I have a reason to be there.
So I guess it depends on what sort of violence I’m fearing - insider or outsider.
I tell ya though, nothing in Chicago or New York has gotten me quite as rattled as an encounter with some Dublin street urchins back in '99. 10 year old had a mouth on him like I couldn’t believe. I really was scared of him and his friends, especially as they started following us, some stones were thrown and we *were *lost and on foot. (Never trust my husband with directions, ‘sall I’m sayin’.)
It’s hard to tell. People’s perception of a “bad area” is notoriously subjective. I used to laugh at descriptions I’d hear of people who got off the wrong ramp and ended up in Oakland, and how they deeply feared for their lives. Now, Oakland has some seriously sketchy places. But the particular descriptions these people were giving were about areas that were gentrified to all get-out and quite upper-middle class.
When I lived there every time I talked to someone who wasn’t from Oakland they’d look at me like I was living in Baghdad. Then they’d come visit me, and see what my neighbors looked like, and say “Oh, this area is actually really nice.” The kicker was- it wasn’t. My area had a pretty bad crime problem- like a mugging a night during one period. But people saw there weren’t a lot of black people and assumed it was therefor a “nice area.”
I think part of the situation is that as tourists we are less likely to go to the less safe areas. They don’t tend to have the fun things to see/do there. Also on a vacation trip, we are predisposed to have fun, as that is the purpose of the whole trip.
I do remember amazing American tourists who thought somewhere as pretty as Oxford could have no crime issues. Certainly, you aren’t going to get mugged in Trinity College gardens (sloaned to death maybe), but Blackbird Lees had its moments a few years back.
Knowing LEO’s like I do, generally when they see dudes slumming way down their socio-economic level in bad areas, it’s becuase those dudes are trying to score some dope.
I went to Memphis in September, and experienced my first attempted mugging ever. When I told a local musician friend about it, he said that Memphis had gotten a lot more dangerous: an upscale restaurant he where he played had just been robbed ‘Pulp Fiction’ style (customers were ordered to the floor, etc.) An article that week in (I think) the Memphis Times claimed that Memphis’ crime rate was second only to Detroit’s among US cities.
I know you asked about dangerous areas in US/Europe. But I was talking to my sister who recently got back from Papua New Guinea, and I think its a safe bet they’ve got both of them beat!
I’d say this, too. Most of my experiences in big American cities have been in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit and NYC, from most to least time spent. I’ve been in situations where I’ve felt mildly threatened, but never seriously in danger. I’ve never been mugged, or injured by anyone with criminal intent. Just by shouting a warning I think I prevented a fistfight between two adults on a public playground once. And my dorm room (in a small Ohio college town) was broken into twice and vandalized, come to think of it. That, knock on wood, has been my limited personal experience with crime here.
When I was in London in the 1988-89, there were some dicey moments, incl. a drunk and aggressive guy on a train who didn’t want to leave my friends and me alone, and once a guy who was trying to beat up his girlfriend on the street (I was one of several bystanders who rushed in to stop him, and the police soon arrived, fortunately). But again, nothing life-threatening.
Don’t be an idiot, use common sense, be aware of your surroundings, don’t go looking for trouble, and you’ll be fine just about anywhere in the U.S., IMHO.
Post Guiliani NYC is probably a bad example. Since the 90s, NYC has become the city of Seinfield, Friends, Sex And The City and a million romantic comedies. Parts of the Bronx and Queens are still kind of sketch.
For your true urban blight, you need to go to places like Detroit or Little Rock, AK
