The Fog Of Safety - How Collective Perceptions Drive Personal Fears (Columbia: real estate market, to rent)

[adelphi_sky]

What drives your fear? When do you feel unsafe enough to avoid a neighborhood, mall, state, or country?

This topic has been touched on briefly in various threads in this forum. And the recent discussion about The BLVD At The Cap Center and it's perception as an unsafe environment has prompted me to devote a thread to the subject of safety.


Crime Reporting

Many people suggest that safety can be quantifiable. There are crime reports that tally the number of reported incidents within a given area. The higher the incidents, the less safe that area is called. But has one considered the deeper meanings behind the raw numbers? For example, density. Is density ever taken into account when reading crime stats? If one sees 100 robberies in one area and 10 robberies in another, at face value, one could surmise that the area with 100 robberies is less safe than the number of 10 robberies in the other area. Now, what if the first area was a city of 100,000 and the second was a town of 10,000. The robbery ratio is still 1:1000 for both. Should the smaller town be considered more safe then?

How about the types of crime? When someone sees that there have been 20 violent crimes in a neighborhood as opposed to 5 in another, do they understand the types of crimes that occurred and the reasons why those crimes took place? Many times, the story behind the crime is not revealed. In the neighborhood with 20 violent crimes, 10 may be domestic violence. The other 5 may be from disagreements that got out of hand - bar fights, etc. And still others may be by unrelated individuals. Then consider that the 5 crimes in the second neighborhood may be where random people have been victims of the Knockout Game. How then does that change the perception of safety? Would people feel less safe about an abusive partner in some random home or being randomly knocked in the head walking down the street?


Cleanliness

Believe it or not, this also drives the perception of safety. I have read a few times in threads where the individual immediately assumed an area was unsafe because it was unkempt. Yards may be overgrown, trash littering the streets, bad roads, etc. Either the area is unsafe, or the city has a horrible neighborhood maintenance program. One individual went as far to say an area, not known for crime, felt unsafe because the buildings in the area were old. I imagine that if a jurisdiction had an A+ cleaning crew even though crime was high, would that person still feel safer because of the manicured lawns and clean streets?


Media

We all know that media drives a LOT of perceptions. Media has the power to shape the views of thousands of individuals to their liking. Mainly because we like to be spoon fed information these days. And trust me, I have fallen victim to this phenomenon as well. I remember when I visited Long Beach for a friend's wedding and passed a number of the neighborhoods that were highlighted in a bunch of the gang movies in the 80s and 90s. I had a little anxiety walking down the streets by myself in a place I had never been before that was perceived as being gang infested. Yet, the neighborhoods were well kept. No one was hanging out on the street corners wearing red or blue. No one came up to me to sell me anything. My experience didn't match my perception. The media constantly creates that disconnect between personal experience and what we perceive how safe a place is. And though I came along ten years after the gang era, I carried those perceptions with me because I had no other reference point to draw from. Or I just failed to do the research on my own.


Prejudice

How much is fear driven by prejudice? Studies have shown that more people feel unsafe around groups of black men on a street corner than groups of white men. Even black people admitted to being more tense in those situations. Myself included. Or how about the other side of that coin? I can admit that when driving through North Carolina to rent a cabin in the mountains, I avoided a fruit stand in the country that had confederate flags everywhere. Being from a northern city, I don't have to be confronted with those visuals, but in the South, people are more used to it. And for all I know, my experience could have been the opposite of what my perception or prejudice was. Should I have felt unsafe by the sight of confederate flags and the white individuals who worked there? Would I have been harmed? Chances are, no. Should a person feel unsafe walking through Columbia Heights even though that's one of the hottest real estate markets in DC? Or because there's a heavy Latino population, it doesn't feel as safe?


Experience

What happened to you didn't necessarily happen to me or anyone else for that matter. How then does a person feel about a certain area after a personal experience. On one hand, this individual may have had their car broken into. On the other hand, that may have been the only break-in for that year. For that person, they feel unsafe. Reading some posts in threads, you'd think some areas needed the National Guard. Yet in my own experiences, nothing occurred to where I felt like my personal being or property were at risk. Therefore is the area unsafe for all? Or just the perception of a few individuals who may have experienced crimes against them? It reminds me of product reviews on Amazon or in Yelp. Those who are wronged are usually the most vocal. Those who had great experiences are somewhat less vocal. And those whose experience was so-so are usually silent. Could this be applied to safety?


A lot of these things drive people's perception of safety. Unfortunately a lot of places that could offer a reasonable amount of safety are labeled as unsafe and avoided at all costs. And when that perception is shared with others, that feeds a collective perception driven by the perception of one person or the media. With so many variables, safety can only be subjective. When crime reporting gets a cursory glance or racial prejudices are involved, safety can be different for different people.

What drives your perception of safety for an area? Experience, prejudice, crime reports, cleanliness, or the media?

[EHCT]

First of all, how one judges the safety of a certain area is always going to be relative to that individual. For example, someone growing up in a rough part of Chicago may laugh at people who claim that Wheaton is rough. Conversely, someone growing up in Calabasas, California may see Wheaton as a place to avoid...so experience will most always be part of the mix.

For myself, I take a combination of things into consideration before coming to a conclusion (right or wrong) about the safety of a particular area. Usually if I go out of my way to avoid a particular area it's because the area has a reputation for being that has been substantiated by crime reports and/or by acquaintances who are familiar with the area telling me to be careful. As an example, when I first moved to PG I was warned that Suitland isn't necessarily a place I'd want to frequent. Well my wife used to teach at Drew Freeman MS and when I would pick her up from work I always used to think about how people made Suitland out to be crime central. I would think ...yes Suitland is a little rough around the edges but I never felt the least bit uncomfortable in the area. However, it didn't take me long to realize that daytime Suitland and nighttime Suitland are 2 totally different entities. Do people get shot or robbed in Suitland on a daily basis? Of course not. However I wouldn't feel comfortable going on my evening jog down Suitland Rd. either because to me that would be unsafe.

I remember a few years back there was a spike in robberies at Arundel Mills Mall. People were getting jacked in the parking lots when the sun went down. I had been to the mall a few times before and had never really felt that it was unsafe to be there at night. However, after hearing about the spike in robberies I figured that maybe things have changed or that the parking lots weren't as safe as they should be. Sure, people get robbed in all sorts of places but when I compute my risk/reward equation in my head I tend to avoid places where bad things happen in bunches. The way I look at it, if bad things keep happening in the same localized area they must be happening for a reason so why not avoid it if possible.

Personally speaking a certain area doesn't necessarily have to be rife with random violence for me to deem that area unsafe. For instance, if an area isn't well lit or only has one way in and one way out my guard is automatically up. Or if an area always seems to have people hanging out and wandering around aimlessly then I usually lean toward deeming that area as a place to be on guard. I'm not going to wait for something to actually happen to me before I consider an area unsafe. If a place feels a bit shady to me then I'm going to assume that it is shady. If I'm proven wrong then I will happily say as much.