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I’ve never met people who apologize and condone crime more than in Baltimore. I don’t know if it’s delusional or if it’s a joke. Maybe it’s embarrassment. But whatever it is, it is not helpful.
That's the first realization you make when you're there for a min. Most crimes get time served even homicide. Same folks let back on the street almost as if crime is the economy.
Your words and the stats in your link don’t line up. Otterbein has 2k people and had 4 homicides this year. That’s a pretty horrific rate for any center neighborhood (200 per 100k). That’s about the average number of annual homicides in the Loop, which has 50k people and even more foot traffic.
It also had zero last year.
It is a horrific rate for sure, but The Loop & Otterbein are not analogous to each other. DT Baltimore has ~10k residents and had 1 homicide which would be a more apples to apples comparison
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Originally Posted by manitopiaaa
The only places in Baltimore where I’m not in safety mode are Federal Hill and Charles Village now (which I knew well from my graduate years). Even just a walk from Oriole Park to Inner Harbor requires being on guard. Downtown also doesn’t feel as safe as it did when I’d mindlessly jaunt from Mount Vernon to Inner Harbor. Will you statistically die? Considering almost 90% of Baltimore’s murders are Black males, it’s highly unlikely, but the fact that we now see 10+ homicides across Federal Hill, Fells Point, Otterbein, Downtown, Mount Vernon, and Inner Harbor a year should be a wakeup call that every year the murders become less geographically concentrated. And this of course says nothing of non-fatal violent crimes or thefts that tourists are more likely to see.
Don't disagree.
Obviously this thread is from a suburban perspective so the only focuses are going to be on the tourist spots as 9.5/10 no one from the burbs is venturing anywhere in West or North East Baltimore.
Quote:
Originally Posted by manitopiaaa
I think Baltimore would do better to acknowledge people’s concerns here instead of this weird defensiveness where every concern about crime is immediately discarded as “your fears are invalid.” Not everyone has the same risk tolerance, especially in a market like Baltimore Metro where suburbanites can easily choose to spend time in Annapolis, Ellicott City, or Arundel Mills and not have to be on edge. Hard to enjoy yourself when you’re constantly looking behind your shoulder.
It's not defensives nor is anyone fears being invalidated it's just open honest questioning. I'm a 30 yr old mixed (AA, Hispanic & white) man from the burbs who goes into the city (rough areas included) habitually for a endless reason. I treat Baltimore no different than I treat my current place of residence (San Diego) or when I was backpacking in Manila, PI.
Use common sense, look over your shoulder (no matter what city you are in) and have good spatial awareness. Those don't have to be mutually exclusive from having a good time.
I’ve never met people who apologize and condone crime more than in Baltimore. I don’t know if it’s delusional or if it’s a joke. Maybe it’s embarrassment. But whatever it is, it is not helpful.
It's called normalization, and if you grow up in Baltimore, it's easy to simply see it as a feature of life. I still have stickers from the American Visionary Art Museum that say "Harm City," "I Survived Baltimore," and "Bodymore, Murderland."
I bought them when I was in grad school and thought they were hilarious. Now when I look at them, it seems a little grotesque to be selling pun souvenirs about the vast suffering in the city due to crime. But that's when I realized Baltimore was past the point of no return. When citizens refuse to hold their city leaders accountable (and they routinely go to prison with hardly a peep), and crime becomes not just normalized but a "quirky" and indelible part of your local identity, then you know nothing will change.
It wasn't until I moved to Northern Virginia after grad school that the contrast hit me. Northern Virginia has 3.2 million people with a murder rate of 1.85 per 100k. I go walking at night on the East Coast Greenway with headphones in my ears. My brother drives to Wawa at 4am after a video game binge and doesn't think twice. I've had Amazon packages stay at my apartment door for 6 days while I was on vacation and nothing happened to them.
It's easy to downplay crime until you've seen the alternative. And that's what a lot of Baltimoreans miss from the equation. The people they want to frequent the city have seen the alternative - they live the alternative. They live in Severna Park, Ellicott City, Columbia, Crownsville, and they don't tolerate what Baltimore proper does. And rightfully so, in my opinion.
It's called normalization, and if you grow up in Baltimore, it's easy to simply see it as a feature of life. I still have stickers from the American Visionary Art Museum that say "Harm City," "I Survived Baltimore," and "Bodymore, Murderland."
I bought them when I was in grad school and thought they were hilarious. Now when I look at them, it seems a little grotesque to be selling pun souvenirs about the vast suffering in the city due to crime. But that's when I realized Baltimore was past the point of no return. When citizens refuse to hold their city leaders accountable (and they routinely go to prison with hardly a peep), and crime becomes not just normalized but a "quirky" and indelible part of your local identity, then you know nothing will change.
It wasn't until I moved to Northern Virginia after grad school that the contrast hit me. Northern Virginia has 3.2 million people with a murder rate of 1.85 per 100k. I go walking at night on the East Coast Greenway with headphones in my ears. My brother drives to Wawa at 4am after a video game binge and doesn't think twice. I've had Amazon packages stay at my apartment door for 6 days while I was on vacation and nothing happened to them.
It's easy to downplay crime until you've seen the alternative. And that's what a lot of Baltimoreans miss from the equation. The people they want to frequent the city have seen the alternative - they live the alternative. They live in Severna Park, Ellicott City, Columbia, Crownsville, and they don't tolerate what Baltimore proper does. And rightfully so, in my opinion.
I lived in Tokyo for 4 years.. the grass doesn’t get much greener on the other side
Violence in Baltimore is not normalized or downplayed. Is it a “way of life” yes but you’re silly if you think people in the city think it’s in anyway shape or form normal. The only people sharing its “quirky” are rich single college kids moving into Hampden or Fed Hill.
No one from Baltimore is missing the crime equation. They’ve either learned how to tolerate or mitigate it and now go about their day in the city or they moved to the burbs or another city. That simple.
People shouldn’t knock either because it’s their lifestyle choice, not yours.
The only time I ever drove through Newark, en route from a random NJ exurb where a friend lived to NYC, I was stopped at a red light, and some guy pulled up on my right with a let's just say 'very noticeably customized' car, music absolutely blaring. I couldn't help but glance over due to the attention-grabbing nature of his arrival at the red light, and when I did, he spat out his window, menacingly. This particular guy seemed to want to intimidate White Boy, and I'll admit that he succeeded in doing so. Ten agonizing seconds or so later, the light turned green, we drove an extra block or so alongside one another...and I then noticed police lights in my rearview, as he was getting pulled over, perhaps for violating the NJ state decibel limit via his subwoofer.
The above notwithstanding, my friend lived in what he referred to as the 'ghetto' of Newark for around a year while working at their newspaper, and he reported no problems--he seemed to enjoy it, if primarily for its proximity to NYC. I'll admit that from what I saw in my limited exposure, that would be one of the few cities in this country where I'd...not necessarily want to be there.
I went to college in Newark, NJ. Yes NJ suburbanites are afraid of Newark a lot and the North Jersey suburbanites are afraid of NYC as well, but mostly Newark the most. I was miserable in college since it was in Newark and I could not wait to graduate although I was a commuter. Newark is boring and unsafe. Panhandlers sell airheads right off the intersection where I-280 East turns into a wide exit. Once I parked near my college (I did not pay for the parking garage in college, I parked on random streets nearby) and a guy comes up to me to tell a sob story. A college friend told me a drunk guy jumped on top of the hood of his car while parking. My college campus doors were always unlocked anyone could go in there and one time a homeless guy yelled at some woman in the campus center. My college is a commuter school and most of the people from the suburbs will just go to school and go home, and that's why making friends in that school is difficult. I do not miss college at all.
No there is nothing wrong with working from home, or eating at a local place or whatever, but a side effect if people became more ignorant of what is right outside their door. Like there were suburbanite across the country as late as the fall of ‘21 that seemed convinced Downtown (or whatever area was the core of BLM protests) was destroyed by rioters. When outside of Minneapolis and perhaps LA there wasn’t that much damage done in most cities. People didn’t know that because in many cases suburbanites just hadn’t been to the city for a year and a half.
Portland was hurt big time by the BLM protests. I was there in July 2022 and there was still a bunch of stuff boarded up downtown.
I don't know that people in the suburbs of Dallas are adverse to going into the city, but there is less emphasis on going into the city vs. other places Ive lived.
Globally, I nominated Johannesburg, South Africa to be the winner.
A few decades ago many suburban Clevelanders wouldn't venture anywhere in the city, but now there are a few neighborhoods that are "acceptable" to suburbanites. Ohio City, Tremont, Detroit Shoreway, Little Italy, University Circle, West Park, and Larchmere are neighborhoods suburbanites now feel somewhat comfortable going to. I grew up in the city but went to a private school in the suburbs and remember being warned about going into the city or riding the Rapid by my suburban friend's parents. Anywhere on the East Side is still considered by most suburbanites to be a war-zone where the chances you'll get robbed or worse are extremely high. Even the inner ring suburbs are considered "scary" by some. Of course this isn't actually true, but that's the perception.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
44,570 posts, read 81,147,605 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by oregonwoodsmoke
I suspect that all up and down the west coast, people stay out of the city core, not because of fear of crime but because they don't like stepping over human feces and used drug needles on the sidewalks and walking around all the homeless that are camped on the city sidewalks, and dodging all the panhandlers.
Yes, this is certainly true for both Seattle and Portland. I work in Seattle and while we still get many tourists from other states and countries, the locals from the Eastside are well aware of the homeless problem and crime, so they avoid going there. I suspect it has been a benefit to Bellevue, where one can shop for hours and find their car intact when they get back to it, not to mention ample free parking, and no homeless blocking the sidewalk or asking for money. We have friends that moved here on the eastside in 2019 that have never been to Seattle .
Pre-Covid we would drive to Portland 3-4 times a year. When we went back the first time after Covid in 2021 we were amazed at how much the homeless and graffiti had increased. Places where we had felt perfectly safe in the past were still OK, but we definitely became more aware of our surroundings and were more carful.
It's easy to downplay crime until you've seen the alternative. And that's what a lot of Baltimoreans miss from the equation. The people they want to frequent the city have seen the alternative - they live the alternative. They live in Severna Park, Ellicott City, Columbia, Crownsville, and they don't tolerate what Baltimore proper does. And rightfully so, in my opinion.
Very well said. I live the alternative. There are no squeegie boys on my streets, threatening to bust my windshield if I don't fork over some money for their unwanted "service." Nor are there homeless beggars everywhere (though, to be fair, I've found Baltimore's beggars to be surprisingly polite and non-threatening). When I'm in my own neighborhood, I don't have to worry about being knocked down and kicked bloody because I'm a white guy, like what happened to a guy right across the street from my office building in the central business district, in broad daylight. (Yeah, I went there with the race thing. That's the reality of Baltimore.)
Am I a coward? Am I over-reacting? Maybe. But I'm also a middle-aged, out-of-shape guy with a family to protect, and I see no upside to putting myself and my family in harm's way.
When crime happens in someone else's neighborhood it's always "crime is contained to that area, just stay out of there and you'll be fine". When it happens in your neighborhood it's always "crime doesn't have an address. It can happen anywhere" (funny because the police log lists an address). Earthquakes can happen anywhere too, but that doesn't mean the risk is the same in Indiana as it is in Indonesia
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