Is Downtown Chicago safe anymore? (Champaign, Urbana: crimes, neighborhoods, school)

[marothisu]

These are numbers since January 1, 2007:
* North Center - 3. Less than 1/2 per year average. First recorded homicide this year since 2008. Basically a few idiots get in an argument about a weed plant and one of them stabs the other.

* Armour Square (Chinatown) - 5. Less than 1 per year average. Hasn't had one since December 2012.
* Lincoln Park - 6. Less than 1 per year average. Hasn't had one since September 2011. One of those was an iPhone thief at the Fullerton stop who pushed a woman, who happened to fall down the stairs and die from her injuries.

* Loop - 6. Less than 1 per year average. Hasn't had one since May 2011. 4 of those happened in 2008.
* Lincoln Square - 6. Less than 1 per year average. One homicide earlier this year was a woman checking her and her 5 month old son into a hotel and then killing the 5 month old.

* Hyde Park - 8. A little over 1 per year
* Lake View - 11. About 1.5 per year. Hasn't had a homicide since last May.

Then there's others like Edison Park and Mount Greenwood with 0 recorded homicides in that amount of time (since 1/1/2007). Jefferson Park with 5, O'Hare with 1, Forest Glen with 1, Beverly with 3, Clearing with 6, Dunning with 7, Hegewisch with 5, Montclare with 4, North Park with 4, Norwood Park with 4, West Elsdon and Oakland each with 7. Theses are basically an average of 1 or less per year..

[INsync33]

Come on another troll on the chicago forum.

[emathias]

Originally Posted by MichiVegas

There's no evidence of this. The safest neighborhoods in NYC are generally safer than the safest neighborhoods in Chicago. There are very urban neighborhoods with zero murders in NYC; while in Chicago the equivalent Lincoln Park/Lakeview neighborhoods do have murders.

And this is just a stupid defense mechanism. "Crime in the South Side and West Side doesn't matter because Lincoln Park has very few murders". Crime is crime, and for the purposes of measuring a city's relative crime rate, the city, as a whole, matters.

Everyone knows that crime is variable by location and that there are blocks in Detroit that are relatively safe and blocks in Evanston that are relatively unsafe, but you would have to be crazy to say Detroit is as safe as Evanston because if you pick Block A in Detroit it is as safe as Block B in Evanston.

But, to the thread title, yes, I think downtown Chicago is relatively safe, for an urban area, and I would not have worries.

So when you say that crime in the other municipalities of the New York Metro Area doesn't matter for safe NYC neighborhoods, that's somehow different from a Chicagoan pointing out that crime in far neighborhoods doesn't matter for safe City of Chicago neighborhoods?

Hypocrite.

[treemoni]

Originally Posted by Chicago87

This seems to be a troll post. I work in Downtown, Chicago and walk around there all the time pretty much every weekday for the past two years. I have never witnessed any crime. If it isn't safe there, I don't know where it is safe then.

Exactly. I think the whole "flash mob" thing is an urban tale.

[marothisu]

Originally Posted by treemoni

Exactly. I think the whole "flash mob" thing is an urban tale.

They exist, but the level to which they were written up about in the papers is ridiculous. As a resident of that area, I never even saw any group of black teens beating up or robbing anyone. On July 4, I walked right through a supposed huge flash mob group, according to the news later, and nothing happened to me.

They exist, and most of them just shoplift, but the extent to which they were told about in the papers is ****ing ridiculous. In the end though, robbery is still dumb.

[chet everett]

Crime is a pretty unintelligent means of enriching one's self, especially the sort of low reward / high likelihood of punishment that often happens in Chicago's busiest tourist districts, though no one is claiming that the petty criminals that do engage in these activities are other than stupid. Trying to leverage any sort of "distraction" has been part of the street criminals' far longer than there have been "social media" -- pick pockets have used the chaos of bazaars / marketplaces as far back as recorded history!
The fact that these "mobs" are rarely more than an annoyance to folks that live in the area does not diminish the fact that for folks that do have their cell phones snatched or businesses that loose customers during the ensuing chaos, however short lived they may be, suffer real losses and it is completely understand that news outlets would choose to cover such crime. The frequency with which CPD can bust up these things before any thefts / thuggery results is directly related to how much personnel can be assigned to these things AND how much risk CPD is willing to accept by pulling officers from other areas...

[Ace Rothstein]

I think Rocky wrote the Chicago Stay Safe Wikitravel bit.

Chicago travel guide - Wikitravel

Originally Posted by Wikitravel

Chicago is a big city with big city problems. The majority of the city's violent crimes occur within a very large number of neighborhoods, both on and off the beaten path in the North, West, and South Sides, and given the chance nature of crime, you should exercise extreme precautions wherever you go.

The city caught international media attention for an uptick in homicides in 2012 with an official count of 506 that year. Especially with flashmob violence rising tremendously throughout the city. Some violence is gang-on-gang violence, but the overwhelming majority of violence as of 2012-13 is against tourists and innocent people.

More dangerous still is the massive and extensive attacks of flash mobs on people throughout the city, especially within the Loop area and neighborhoods adjoining and near the Loop area (sometimes as far west as the Austin neighborhood or as far south as the Chatham neighborhood.) Numerous attacks occur daily, even against the CTA, school campuses, and even against uniformed police officers.

There are, in fact, very few neighborhoods of the city proper, located on the far north side and on the southwest side near Midway Airport that are safe from violence, including the Rogers Park area on the far north side.

[chet everett]

If that site is like regular Wikipedia one ought to be able to : a) register to make edits to the information b) provide links to data that shows the true story c) alert moderators that the information is inaccurate

Might be worth it, frankly a little surprised that there are folks that work for the City / tourism trade groups trying to correct the falsehoods.

[Vlajos]

For Rocky who doesn't appear to be the brightest.

Despite Headlines, Chicago Crime At Lowest Levels In Decades « CBS Chicago


This graph shows crime rates from the 1960s to this year. It seems like a lot of people don't understand that concept, so if you need an explanation, I would be happy to help.

http://cbschicago.files.wordpress.co...rime_index.png

[marothisu]

Originally Posted by Ace Rothstein

I think Rocky wrote the Chicago Stay Safe Wikitravel bit.

Chicago travel guide - Wikitravel

That is really bad and not accurate. I almost feel compelled to edit this with more useful and accurate information. The user who edited this is "Conserve". I see he/she basically took out a paragraph too explaining how there are safe parts of Chicago.