9 ms·

It's always strange to read these reports from American cities that sound like something out of war-torn countries. Delivery workers grouping together to defend

by tazjin 5y ago

It's always strange to read these reports from American cities that sound like something out of war-torn countries. Delivery workers grouping together to defend themselves against hordes of bandits, in well-known places, with no police protection? What the ...? This sort of thing would be unthinkable in central Moscow and most other large European city centres (the only European city I've ever felt unsafe in is Brussels, and that's still quite different from NYC).

redis_mlc 5y ago
> It's always strange to read these reports from American cities that sound like something out of war-torn countries. It's a new thing in the US, and took me about a year to figure out. Democratic Party mayors of US cities think it's "progressive" (Marxist) to not arrest people committing crimes, since the mayors live in gated communities and have bodyguards. Even our light-weight VP, Kamala Harris, bailed out arrestees, and is shirking her official duties by opening the border with Mexico to gerrymander our entire country. Think of it like Nazi brown shirts or Mussolini fascists roaming the streets, but in 2021.
bradleyjg 5y ago
For a while there, NYC was very safe. Then de Blasio got elected. Hopefully, Eric Adams can turn around the disaster Bill is leaving him.
- refurb 5y ago
  SF was always rough but has definitely gotten a bit more lawless. I wonder if we’re seeing history repeat itself? Cities grew in the 50’s, then saw people leave in the 60-70’s, then return in the 90’s.
  - bradleyjg 5y ago
    The usual explanations for the prior crime wave were exogenous—crack cocaine and leaded gasoline are the two I’ve seen most frequently. On the other hand, this latest round seems to be the result of poor policy choices.
    - swearwolf 5y ago
      If crack was a big driver for the previous crime wave, it heroin/fentanyl is likely to be a driver for this one. Or, on the West Coast, meth. It’s made a pretty big comeback since 2017, but it’s been mostly overshadowed by the opioid crisis.
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      There are plenty of non-exogenous causes, they just don't have the same cool-factor for publication as things like leaded gasoline. For example many people were released from institutions during the massive de-institutionalization push that started in the mid 50s [1], going from ~340 institutionalized people per 100,000 in 1955 to about 60 per 100,000 in 1980. One can even argue that the sum of incarcerated and institutionalized has averaged roughly constant (about 450 per 100,000) with a dip during the period of increasing criminality from the 1960s to the 1990s as the incarceration rate had to climb from ~100 to ~450 per 100,000 to make up for the mass de-institutionalization. The cited study is pretty interesting: "The juxtaposition of these trends and the current high incidence of severe mental illness among those behind bars begs the question of whether the mentally ill have simply been transinstitutionalized from mental hospitals to prisons and jails. A related question concerns the extent to which the unprecedented growth in incarceration since the late 1970s is driven by a reduction in public investment in inpatient mental health services. Past changes in sentencing and corrections policies are currently under heightened scrutiny as state prison populations are at record levels and many states are seeking to scale back correctional populations with an eye on the fiscal benefits of doing so. To the extent that the run-up in state prison populations was driven by deinstitutionalization, the current focus on sentence enhancements and the evolution of the U.S. sentencing regime may be misplaced." [1] https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/p71.pdf https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/p71.pd...
- crispyambulance 5y ago
  "Safety" in a city is an outcome of a very large number of interconnected factors. It is not under the control of any one mayor or police commissioner. More importantly, perception plays a large role in how people judge the safety a city or a neighborhood. "Safe" is also very hard to define. Safe for who? Safe in what sense? It's a giant grey area and no one has ever been able to "solve" the crime problem. Getting tough on crime doesn't work, nor does endless social programs, nor does sweeping it under the rug. Hopefully Adams will take a pragmatic approach and do what he can without making it worse. I wish him well.
- jakelazaroff 5y ago
  Crime is down under de Blasio. Virtually every category has continued decreasing since he took office in 2014: https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm (That link only covers through 2019, but if you look at the official CompStat data the two year trend for 2019–2021 is also negative: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statistics/cs-en-us-city.pdf https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statist...)
  - pandaman 5y ago
    I am not sure how is the state stats are relevant in discussing DeBlasio's performance or one week makes a trend though. Here are the annual stats for felonies: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/historical-crime-data/non-seven-major-felony-offenses-2000-2020.pdf https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_... https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/historical-crime-data/seven-major-felony-offenses-2000-2020.pdf https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_... Some crimes are down, some (e.g. murder) are up.
    - jakelazaroff 5y ago
      Oops, didn’t notice the first link was for New York State. The CompStat link includes longer-term trends, though, which is what I was referring to. Crime is down overall, and I suspect that if you controlled for the murder rate increase in all US cities over the past two years it might be flat or down in NYC as well.
      - bradleyjg 5y ago
        If Chicago, San Francisco, and Minneapolis all jump off a bridge NYC should too?
        jessaustin 5y ago
        NYC is subject to the same national economic, demographic, and cultural trends. For example, recently there has been a respiratory pandemic that affected the entire nation.
InfiniteRand 5y ago
I think you should always take these type of articles with a grain of salt. The author seems keen to play up the drama
- rightbyte 5y ago
  Drama? Didn't the SF DA stop enforcing laws on theft under some arbitrary but quite large value? I would not call it an exaggeration.
  - jakelazaroff 5y ago
    The amount of attention spent on Chesa Boudin and shoplifting is puzzling. Wage theft is by far the biggest form of stealing, and it’s rarely — if ever — prosecuted… but instead we’re worried about a small increase in petty larceny?
    - willcipriano 5y ago
      Police officers don't investigate wage theft, labor boards do. Not going after shoplifters, bike thieves and porch pirates doesn't free up any resources in order to go after wage theft, it just makes the area less safe and more expensive.
      - jakelazaroff 5y ago
        Chesa Boudin is the District Attorney, not a police officer. Wage theft is under his jurisdiction.
        colpabar 5y ago
        Has he done anything about it? I don't understand why you're bringing this up when the TFA is about armed robbery. I do understand why someone would bring up SF in the first place, because SF decided to stop prosecuting "petty larceny". TFA is about what you'd also call "petty larceny", and the city seems to not care about it.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
Police in these major American cities, like all public sector workers (and especially emergency workers), get paid really well too. The political system of these major Democrat dominated cities is entirely dysfunctional. The only thing the public sector unions, and their political puppets, offer as a solution, is more social spending: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-longrun https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long... The US is just ahead of the pack in unraveling.
skocznymroczny 5y ago
Could it be the attacks are coming from minority groups and it's uncomfortable to do something about it in the current political climate? Even in places like UK and Germany there were cases of police afraid to intervene to avoid being accused of racism whenever minorities were involved.
- luffapi 5y ago
  This is wildly racist. The police are known to openly harass and abuse minority populations. They’re often even rewarded for it by their racist supporters. Edit: this comment is at -4. Unreal how bad HN’s “community” is. And the site owners do nothing to curb the white supremacy on full display here. Noted.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  1. No, that isn't a thing in the USA. 2. It's not a case of violent ethnic minority preying on peaceful ethnic majority. There probably isn't a single "white" person involved in any of those crimes, as assailant or victim.
- colpabar 5y ago
  Seems like BART's decision to stop releasing footage of crimes committed on SF public transit agrees with you. https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/07/09/bart-withholding-surveillance-videos-of-crime-to-avoid-stereotypes/ https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/07/09/bart-withholdin...
nerdponx 5y ago
The victims themselves here are more or less part of the downtrodden caste. Some of them might not be living in the USA with legal authorization. They probably don't feel like the city is interested in protecting them, and it seems like in some cases they are already familiar with "protecting themselves" in organized groups. So with a lack of political interest in their case, banding together makes perfect sense.
- tazjin 5y ago
  There's no way it's this simple. Looking at a map of NYC, it seems that this must be a fairly major bridge (southernmost connection from the Bronx to Manhattan) for all kinds of traffic. I'd expect plenty of average people not involved in delivery gangs (??) to cross there, too, and have issues with the roving bandits. If this is a known crime hotspot, shouldn't police just be hanging out there?
  - pydry 5y ago
    Is it that hard to believe given the events from the last couple of years that the police arent all that interested in protecting these people? American police also stole $2.5 bn in cash and killed 1,100 people in 2020.
    - tazjin 5y ago
      My point is that there must be people who aren't involved in criminal gangs or deliveries crossing this bridge, too, so there should be a general interest in keeping it safe.
      - brundolf 5y ago
        It seemed like these were targeted attacks- specific time window, specific target group. Most people crossing won't have something worth thousands of dollars on them, which can conveniently act as its own getaway vehicle, and which can then be fenced through what sounded like an established pipeline for this particular item
stagger87 5y ago
Burglary and violence are not specific to American cities. Implying that they are "unthinkable" in large European cities is borderline flame bait.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  I don't really think so. Americans often project this "no-go areas" type thinking onto europe. I'm not aware of any "no-go" areas anywhere in the country. I think a ban on guns, and eg., an extreme historical scarcity of them in the UK means we aren't in the same position at all. Yes there may be gangs. Yes there may be murders. But I think people delivering food on bikes arent in danger basically anywhere.
  - bovine3dom 5y ago
    In Manchester in the UK there was one in 2019: an old railway line which has been converted into a bike path, the Fallowfield loop. Groups of teenagers were attacking cyclists with hammers and logs. I believe that the police woke up to it and it has calmed now but it was definitely a no-go area for me for a few months. I'm pretty sure someone tried to drop a fist-sized rock on me while I cycled under a bridge...
  - stagger87 5y ago
    Bike robbery and theft is an issue in Europe, especially e-bikes. > Americans often project this "no-go areas" type thinking onto europe. I'm not aware of any "no-go" areas anywhere in the country. This just comes off as more flame bait. What kind of discussion do you expect to have with this sort of comment?
    - mjburgess 5y ago
      Well, at least, someone offering a counter-example.
downrightmike 5y ago
Not war-torn, more like lawless wastelands. Cops don't really stop crime, the get their ticket quota and then if they have to follow up on other crime, they may show up and take a report.
- downrightmike 5y ago
  Just first hand experience, y'all don't like it, well, I don't like it either.
aerosmile 5y ago
Spoiler alert: the murder rate in Russia is 40% higher than in the US, and that's despite the very different gun laws [1][2]. Nothing ruins a good story like facts. That's also why you should always raise before you launch or enter a new market, etc. People are suckers for a story, and our brains are pre-wired to explain phenomena rather than to question them. Once you master that psychology (and manipulation) of people, you'll be better at fundraising - and apparently at journalism as well! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Russia [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
- twic 5y ago
  Could you expand on what this has to do with tazjin's point, which is specifically about delivery workers being attacked by robbers, and the police doing nothing about it, in specific cities?
  - aerosmile 5y ago
    He started off with "It's always strange to read these reports from American cities..." It's strange because it's exaggerated, and it's exaggerated because it has to be - otherwise nobody would care to read the article (and then nobody would pay for this poor reporter's salary who has to hit certain monthly pageview targets, etc). If you read something in the news and it sounds really strange, don't take it at face value.
    - wan23 5y ago
      I used to live by the bridge mentioned in the article as a place where people got attacked, and I believe it 100% fwiw.
- tsywke44 5y ago
  There's a HUGE difference between getting murdered by your friend in a drunken argument, and getting murdered by a stranger street criminal trying to rob you....
CalRobert 5y ago
It's an issue in Dublin, Ireland too. Deliveroo riders are attacked and police seem to disregard it as an issue. Then when the riders started making maps describing which areas were dangerous the pearl-clutchers described it as "classist". https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/deliveroo-riders-say-they-are-deliberately-targeted-for-violent-attacks-1.3802955 https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/deliveroo...
- MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
  Ah yes, status-boosting Luxury Beliefs the consequences of which the weakest have to endure. A pattern that repeats itself since decades.
MisterTea 5y ago
This is nothing new, the South Bronx has always been a notorious crime ridden mess. I used to hang around some trucking forums and found that in the 70's-80's into the 90's Hunts Point was legendary among truckers as a war zone. From the stories and anecdotes the route between the ports and the expressway was a gauntlet of armed highwaymen. It was so bad truckers would not stop for red lights or stop signs for fear of being hijacked in broad daylight. It was customary to lean on the horn and try to roll through. A few even admitted to illegally carrying a pistol for protection.

by tazjin 5y ago

redis_mlc 5y ago

> It's always strange to read these reports from American cities that sound like something out of war-torn countries. It's a new thing in the US, and took me about a year to figure out. Democratic Party mayors of US cities think it's "progressive" (Marxist) to not arrest people committing crimes, since the mayors live in gated communities and have bodyguards. Even our light-weight VP, Kamala Harris, bailed out arrestees, and is shirking her official duties by opening the border with Mexico to gerrymander our entire country. Think of it like Nazi brown shirts or Mussolini fascists roaming the streets, but in 2021.

bradleyjg 5y ago

For a while there, NYC was very safe. Then de Blasio got elected. Hopefully, Eric Adams can turn around the disaster Bill is leaving him.

refurb 5y ago
SF was always rough but has definitely gotten a bit more lawless. I wonder if we’re seeing history repeat itself? Cities grew in the 50’s, then saw people leave in the 60-70’s, then return in the 90’s.
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  The usual explanations for the prior crime wave were exogenous—crack cocaine and leaded gasoline are the two I’ve seen most frequently. On the other hand, this latest round seems to be the result of poor policy choices.
  - swearwolf 5y ago
    If crack was a big driver for the previous crime wave, it heroin/fentanyl is likely to be a driver for this one. Or, on the West Coast, meth. It’s made a pretty big comeback since 2017, but it’s been mostly overshadowed by the opioid crisis.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    There are plenty of non-exogenous causes, they just don't have the same cool-factor for publication as things like leaded gasoline. For example many people were released from institutions during the massive de-institutionalization push that started in the mid 50s [1], going from ~340 institutionalized people per 100,000 in 1955 to about 60 per 100,000 in 1980. One can even argue that the sum of incarcerated and institutionalized has averaged roughly constant (about 450 per 100,000) with a dip during the period of increasing criminality from the 1960s to the 1990s as the incarceration rate had to climb from ~100 to ~450 per 100,000 to make up for the mass de-institutionalization. The cited study is pretty interesting: "The juxtaposition of these trends and the current high incidence of severe mental illness among those behind bars begs the question of whether the mentally ill have simply been transinstitutionalized from mental hospitals to prisons and jails. A related question concerns the extent to which the unprecedented growth in incarceration since the late 1970s is driven by a reduction in public investment in inpatient mental health services. Past changes in sentencing and corrections policies are currently under heightened scrutiny as state prison populations are at record levels and many states are seeking to scale back correctional populations with an eye on the fiscal benefits of doing so. To the extent that the run-up in state prison populations was driven by deinstitutionalization, the current focus on sentence enhancements and the evolution of the U.S. sentencing regime may be misplaced." [1] https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/p71.pdf https://gspp.berkeley.edu/assets/uploads/research/pdf/p71.pd...
crispyambulance 5y ago
"Safety" in a city is an outcome of a very large number of interconnected factors. It is not under the control of any one mayor or police commissioner. More importantly, perception plays a large role in how people judge the safety a city or a neighborhood. "Safe" is also very hard to define. Safe for who? Safe in what sense? It's a giant grey area and no one has ever been able to "solve" the crime problem. Getting tough on crime doesn't work, nor does endless social programs, nor does sweeping it under the rug. Hopefully Adams will take a pragmatic approach and do what he can without making it worse. I wish him well.
jakelazaroff 5y ago
Crime is down under de Blasio. Virtually every category has continued decreasing since he took office in 2014: https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm (That link only covers through 2019, but if you look at the official CompStat data the two year trend for 2019–2021 is also negative: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statistics/cs-en-us-city.pdf https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/crime_statist...)
- pandaman 5y ago
  I am not sure how is the state stats are relevant in discussing DeBlasio's performance or one week makes a trend though. Here are the annual stats for felonies: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/historical-crime-data/non-seven-major-felony-offenses-2000-2020.pdf https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_... https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/historical-crime-data/seven-major-felony-offenses-2000-2020.pdf https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_... Some crimes are down, some (e.g. murder) are up.
  - jakelazaroff 5y ago
    Oops, didn’t notice the first link was for New York State. The CompStat link includes longer-term trends, though, which is what I was referring to. Crime is down overall, and I suspect that if you controlled for the murder rate increase in all US cities over the past two years it might be flat or down in NYC as well.
    - bradleyjg 5y ago
      If Chicago, San Francisco, and Minneapolis all jump off a bridge NYC should too?
      - jessaustin 5y ago
        NYC is subject to the same national economic, demographic, and cultural trends. For example, recently there has been a respiratory pandemic that affected the entire nation.

InfiniteRand 5y ago

I think you should always take these type of articles with a grain of salt. The author seems keen to play up the drama

rightbyte 5y ago
Drama? Didn't the SF DA stop enforcing laws on theft under some arbitrary but quite large value? I would not call it an exaggeration.
- jakelazaroff 5y ago
  The amount of attention spent on Chesa Boudin and shoplifting is puzzling. Wage theft is by far the biggest form of stealing, and it’s rarely — if ever — prosecuted… but instead we’re worried about a small increase in petty larceny?
  - willcipriano 5y ago
    Police officers don't investigate wage theft, labor boards do. Not going after shoplifters, bike thieves and porch pirates doesn't free up any resources in order to go after wage theft, it just makes the area less safe and more expensive.
    - jakelazaroff 5y ago
      Chesa Boudin is the District Attorney, not a police officer. Wage theft is under his jurisdiction.
      - colpabar 5y ago
        Has he done anything about it? I don't understand why you're bringing this up when the TFA is about armed robbery. I do understand why someone would bring up SF in the first place, because SF decided to stop prosecuting "petty larceny". TFA is about what you'd also call "petty larceny", and the city seems to not care about it.

CryptoPunk 5y ago

Police in these major American cities, like all public sector workers (and especially emergency workers), get paid really well too. The political system of these major Democrat dominated cities is entirely dysfunctional. The only thing the public sector unions, and their political puppets, offer as a solution, is more social spending: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-longrun https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long... The US is just ahead of the pack in unraveling.

skocznymroczny 5y ago

Could it be the attacks are coming from minority groups and it's uncomfortable to do something about it in the current political climate? Even in places like UK and Germany there were cases of police afraid to intervene to avoid being accused of racism whenever minorities were involved.

luffapi 5y ago
This is wildly racist. The police are known to openly harass and abuse minority populations. They’re often even rewarded for it by their racist supporters. Edit: this comment is at -4. Unreal how bad HN’s “community” is. And the site owners do nothing to curb the white supremacy on full display here. Noted.
nerdponx 5y ago
1. No, that isn't a thing in the USA. 2. It's not a case of violent ethnic minority preying on peaceful ethnic majority. There probably isn't a single "white" person involved in any of those crimes, as assailant or victim.
colpabar 5y ago
Seems like BART's decision to stop releasing footage of crimes committed on SF public transit agrees with you. https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/07/09/bart-withholding-surveillance-videos-of-crime-to-avoid-stereotypes/ https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/07/09/bart-withholdin...

nerdponx 5y ago

The victims themselves here are more or less part of the downtrodden caste. Some of them might not be living in the USA with legal authorization. They probably don't feel like the city is interested in protecting them, and it seems like in some cases they are already familiar with "protecting themselves" in organized groups. So with a lack of political interest in their case, banding together makes perfect sense.

tazjin 5y ago
There's no way it's this simple. Looking at a map of NYC, it seems that this must be a fairly major bridge (southernmost connection from the Bronx to Manhattan) for all kinds of traffic. I'd expect plenty of average people not involved in delivery gangs (??) to cross there, too, and have issues with the roving bandits. If this is a known crime hotspot, shouldn't police just be hanging out there?
- pydry 5y ago
  Is it that hard to believe given the events from the last couple of years that the police arent all that interested in protecting these people? American police also stole $2.5 bn in cash and killed 1,100 people in 2020.
  - tazjin 5y ago
    My point is that there must be people who aren't involved in criminal gangs or deliveries crossing this bridge, too, so there should be a general interest in keeping it safe.
    - brundolf 5y ago
      It seemed like these were targeted attacks- specific time window, specific target group. Most people crossing won't have something worth thousands of dollars on them, which can conveniently act as its own getaway vehicle, and which can then be fenced through what sounded like an established pipeline for this particular item

stagger87 5y ago

Burglary and violence are not specific to American cities. Implying that they are "unthinkable" in large European cities is borderline flame bait.

mjburgess 5y ago
I don't really think so. Americans often project this "no-go areas" type thinking onto europe. I'm not aware of any "no-go" areas anywhere in the country. I think a ban on guns, and eg., an extreme historical scarcity of them in the UK means we aren't in the same position at all. Yes there may be gangs. Yes there may be murders. But I think people delivering food on bikes arent in danger basically anywhere.
- bovine3dom 5y ago
  In Manchester in the UK there was one in 2019: an old railway line which has been converted into a bike path, the Fallowfield loop. Groups of teenagers were attacking cyclists with hammers and logs. I believe that the police woke up to it and it has calmed now but it was definitely a no-go area for me for a few months. I'm pretty sure someone tried to drop a fist-sized rock on me while I cycled under a bridge...
- stagger87 5y ago
  Bike robbery and theft is an issue in Europe, especially e-bikes. > Americans often project this "no-go areas" type thinking onto europe. I'm not aware of any "no-go" areas anywhere in the country. This just comes off as more flame bait. What kind of discussion do you expect to have with this sort of comment?
  - mjburgess 5y ago
    Well, at least, someone offering a counter-example.

downrightmike 5y ago

Not war-torn, more like lawless wastelands. Cops don't really stop crime, the get their ticket quota and then if they have to follow up on other crime, they may show up and take a report.

downrightmike 5y ago
Just first hand experience, y'all don't like it, well, I don't like it either.

aerosmile 5y ago

Spoiler alert: the murder rate in Russia is 40% higher than in the US, and that's despite the very different gun laws [1][2]. Nothing ruins a good story like facts. That's also why you should always raise before you launch or enter a new market, etc. People are suckers for a story, and our brains are pre-wired to explain phenomena rather than to question them. Once you master that psychology (and manipulation) of people, you'll be better at fundraising - and apparently at journalism as well! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Russia [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States

twic 5y ago
Could you expand on what this has to do with tazjin's point, which is specifically about delivery workers being attacked by robbers, and the police doing nothing about it, in specific cities?
- aerosmile 5y ago
  He started off with "It's always strange to read these reports from American cities..." It's strange because it's exaggerated, and it's exaggerated because it has to be - otherwise nobody would care to read the article (and then nobody would pay for this poor reporter's salary who has to hit certain monthly pageview targets, etc). If you read something in the news and it sounds really strange, don't take it at face value.
  - wan23 5y ago
    I used to live by the bridge mentioned in the article as a place where people got attacked, and I believe it 100% fwiw.
tsywke44 5y ago
There's a HUGE difference between getting murdered by your friend in a drunken argument, and getting murdered by a stranger street criminal trying to rob you....

CalRobert 5y ago

It's an issue in Dublin, Ireland too. Deliveroo riders are attacked and police seem to disregard it as an issue. Then when the riders started making maps describing which areas were dangerous the pearl-clutchers described it as "classist". https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/deliveroo-riders-say-they-are-deliberately-targeted-for-violent-attacks-1.3802955 https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/deliveroo...

MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
Ah yes, status-boosting Luxury Beliefs the consequences of which the weakest have to endure. A pattern that repeats itself since decades.

MisterTea 5y ago

This is nothing new, the South Bronx has always been a notorious crime ridden mess. I used to hang around some trucking forums and found that in the 70's-80's into the 90's Hunts Point was legendary among truckers as a war zone. From the stories and anecdotes the route between the ports and the expressway was a gauntlet of armed highwaymen. It was so bad truckers would not stop for red lights or stop signs for fear of being hijacked in broad daylight. It was customary to lean on the horn and try to roll through. A few even admitted to illegally carrying a pistol for protection.