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I live in a high-crime area. I hear gunshots every now and then. In two years there's been one shooting on my block. I treat others with respect and mind my ow

I live in a high-crime area. I hear gunshots every now and then. In two years there's been one shooting on my block. I treat others with respect and mind my own business. My neighbors reciprocate, and don't bother me. For various reasons it was convenient for me to go for regularly long walks late at night, and I never ran into any issues with that. There was one homeless guy who was grumpy I woke him up, so I learned to aim my headlamp better. In my experience people who end up seriously hurt by criminals tend to be criminals themselves. It's pretty easy to stay out of all that.

xrd 4y ago
I got really triggered by the crime reporting about Portland because I feel like it is motivated with a political bias. So, I went and looked at the crime reports (which are from the police, and come with their own filters, of course) from Twitter. Almost all the homicides are in areas where significant homeless populations exist. And, very late at night. My takeaway is that it is currently very dangerous to live on the streets. You call them criminals, and I think that is the inevitable consequence of living on the streets, especially when more and more cities are outlawing homelessness, but that's probably more a perspective, and I still have a lot of fear of people living on the streets. Is that the message we see in the media? No, we see that it is more dangerous for the "common person living in a blue city." Random violence is not the root cause of the increase in the homicide rate. This makes me frustrated because the police could easily target those areas from midnight to 6 am and solve 80%+ of the homicides. Or, they could, if you believe that police can stop that kind of violence. Maybe they can, maybe they cannot. They should not be in the business of solving homelessness. The story that homicides in a liberal city were due to BLM protests is a much more bombastic and clicktastic story than that. Sound to me that what I found aligns with your experiences in many ways.

xrd 4y ago

I got really triggered by the crime reporting about Portland because I feel like it is motivated with a political bias. So, I went and looked at the crime reports (which are from the police, and come with their own filters, of course) from Twitter. Almost all the homicides are in areas where significant homeless populations exist. And, very late at night. My takeaway is that it is currently very dangerous to live on the streets. You call them criminals, and I think that is the inevitable consequence of living on the streets, especially when more and more cities are outlawing homelessness, but that's probably more a perspective, and I still have a lot of fear of people living on the streets. Is that the message we see in the media? No, we see that it is more dangerous for the "common person living in a blue city." Random violence is not the root cause of the increase in the homicide rate. This makes me frustrated because the police could easily target those areas from midnight to 6 am and solve 80%+ of the homicides. Or, they could, if you believe that police can stop that kind of violence. Maybe they can, maybe they cannot. They should not be in the business of solving homelessness. The story that homicides in a liberal city were due to BLM protests is a much more bombastic and clicktastic story than that. Sound to me that what I found aligns with your experiences in many ways.