When you say "safe areas" are you talking about safe blocks? I remember driving through Santa Ana there would be one good block then the next bad. It is so mixed together that you can be basically live across the street from a gang infested neighborhood when on the otherside is a nice area.
When I lived there I saw several crimes plus a drive by shooting.. You must have either been not paying attention or extremely lucky. Even when my sister came to visit she was amazed at how many times she saw the cops with their guns pulled and someone face to the ground in a parking lot. And this was only a few blocks from "Knotts Berry Farm".
I have been in two states now since moving away from OC and it is sooo different. It seemed like everyone was moving in slow motion when I left that part of the country.. Way too much going on there for me and too stressful. No thanks, I am glad to be gone..
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Originally Posted by Coldjensens
Because it is a city of over 350,000 people.
If it is so dangerous why was I able to live there for 10 plus years and never see any shootings?
Because it is a city of over 350,000 people.
Santa Ana has nice areas. You cold seperate out those nice areas and you would have a city as nice as say Irvine (only bigger). Santa Ana has some awful areas. If you were to seperate out those areas and make them into a seperate city the crime rate might rival New York or Boston (probably not quite up to Detroit levels, but pretty high).
The press loves to bash on Santa Ana. It is one of their favorite past times because people like to read that and say Boy I am glad that I do not live there. It is consistently exaggeraged and feeding the hype that is generate by prejudice. Look at your own exaggeration. There is not a "possibly gang related shooting" on the website every few days. A quick serch on the internet shows between 17 and 25 murders each year. That is hardly a gang related shooting every few days. Many of those murders are domestic disputes, child neglect, etc.
It also shows that the liklihood of becoming a victim of a crime is somewhat lower in Santa Ana than it is in California as a whole.
If you define shooting as any time someone fires a gun, there appear to be about a dozen "shootings" reported this year. Some of which were suicides, some were a guy shooting into the air, some were domestic violence, some were just reports of people hearing what they believed to be gunshots. These types of "shooting" happen everywhere, they just do nto get reported. There were several that were your typical bad guys shooting bad guys or victims. However the violent crime rate for a city of this size is not that high. You have to look at per capita crime rates. If I live in a small town of 100 people and we have three murders, there is a greater chance of being expose to murder than living in a city of 10,000 that has 60 murders. Thus, you are "safer" in the city with 60 murder than you are in the city with 3 murders.
Thus while Irvine with half as many people and four murders in 2006 was one of the safest Cities, Santa Ana was not that much higher with 26 murders given its size.
More people live in Santa Ana and never encounter any crime whatsoever than live in Irvine alltogether.
I am not saying that every part of Santa Ana is safe. Nor that Santa Ana is safer than Irvine. It is not. But it is not the war zone that media hype, rumour, exaggeration and prejudice often paint it to be. It is an affordable place and many parts of the City are very safe. You cannot judge a city of this size by some global statistic.
Exaggerations make far better story telling than reality often does. to say "Santa Ana is not as safe as Irvine" is boring. But to say "Somone gets killed by a gang banger every three days in Santa Ana" is exciting and ominous. It is also untrue, but hey who is counting when things get exciting.
So yes, the exaggerations typically applied to Santa Ana are just that, exaggerations. According to last years FBI statistics, it is safer than more than half of the U.S. cities of its size.
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