I lived in Menlo Park for a number of years in the late 80s and early 90s - in group house a few blocks away from the border with East Palo Alto. At the time, E

I lived in Menlo Park for a number of years in the late 80s and early 90s - in group house a few blocks away from the border with East Palo Alto. At the time, East PA was poor and had a massively underfunded police department. This resulted in drug dealers realizing the city was a great place to deal from - as the probability they'd get caught was really low. In 1992, East PA had the US's highest per capita murder rate. (We'd hear small arms fire many nights and I remember listening to the radio and hearing a BBC reporter calling in a report from less than a mile away from my house (talking from a phone booth in the since demolished Whiskey Gulch neighborhood) - talking about a war zone like atmosphere with dealers openly carrying Uzi's.) Anyway, in spite of all this nothing ever happened on our street. We walked around without any fear of crime at all. Correlation isn't causation, but it's hard to shake an impression that having an actual police department had something to do with that. Incentives matter and culture tends to follow if they change hard enough.