>Where I live, knowing who and where are the drug dealers and what people are involved in homicide have very real consequences for families and the choices you

>Where I live, knowing who and where are the drug dealers and what people are involved in homicide have very real consequences for families and the choices you make for your children. That's the thing: the (brown/poor) drug dealers that the local media tend to report on are typically not the majority of drug dealers. They're just the ones that are picked up by the police. Thats the whole point of the article we are all commenting on. Your kids are more likely to be enticed into drugs by their friends, not by some rando on a street corner. >Living in fear is when you are worried about things on the other side of the world, and such. That's merely one type of living in fear. >Local news is not fear mongering. "The Haitian immigrants are eating the neighborhood cats and dogs". Yup, definitely not fear mongering. >It is structured delivery of information which would have been delivered as gossip anyway. Local news = gossip. This is not the dunk you think it is. >Not to mention that news exposure helps the police finding dangerous criminals Seems like a stretch >For example serial rapists commonly use the same method with various random victims who are not aware of each other. For known occurrences, I'd expect the police to be more aware of the full details than the local media, if only by sheer numbers. Cops probably outnumber local crime beat reporters by at least a factor of 10. >Once the police and prosecution can connect several victims to the same perpetrator, they will have a very strong case. Leaves out the whole suspect identification part of the process. >Of course you will scoff at all this, since you personally might not have been the victim of violent crime, and therefore couldn't care less. But other people haven't reached that level of rational elevation yet. I.e., living in fear. It's certainly less irrational than, say, someone who has not been a crime victim, I'll give you that. I'm sorry that you were a victim of violent crime, as your comment implies, but in all statistical likelihood the (local) news would not have prevented your victimization.