Ask people who bike from the loop to Oak Park if they've ever been fucked with in Lawndale. I have a friend who was ambushed and knocked off his bike right by Garfield Park.
I have never been mugged in Lakeview. I have been mugged in Austin.
Dangerous neighborhoods aren't a classist myth. In fact, I've come to the conclusion that part of "respecting" the poorer neighborhoods is not pretending like you can walk in front of a crowd of young men hanging out on a corner as if you have just as much a right to be there as they do.
One thing that is for sure, young black teens/men have a much, much more dangerous time of it, regardless of neighborhood than anyone else, and that is tragic.
And while we are adding anecdotes to the thread, I've lived in a "bad" neighborhood on Chicago's South Side for over a decade and I've never had a single violent incident (property crime has occurred). In that same span I was attacked in Lincoln Park and Streeterville, and had an attempted bicycle incident near McCormick Place.
I routinely walk in front of crowds of young men hanging on corners (its daily for me as I pass by a couple of schools) and have never had an incident (and I in fact know many of those young men). But there are also neighborhoods less than a mile away where I would not be comfortable doing that.
You don't think those two things might be related?
> But its also true that the actual incident rate is much exaggerated by the media and perceptions of neighborhood differences are greater than reality.
"Reality" is a tricky concept here. Public (out-of-neighborhood) perception of risk will depress the incident rate by keeping victims out of the area. If you magically caused people to believe that the risk was at some level that you felt reflected the current incident rate, and the incident rate rose because people started going where they shouldn't have, whose beliefs were more accurate?
People don't really care about "how often do muggings take place in this neighborhood?". They care about "if I go in there, am I going to get mugged?".
Also, can we all agree that we'd feel a lot less safe in Wrigleyville after a Cubs game than anywhere else in the city?
Edit -> forgot LoganSq!!!
Well this is part of what I mean by treating people respectfully. As an outsider I always respected that the locals "owned" the neighborhood. You have to be cognizant of the local culture and try not to clash with it.
Any neighborhood can be "dangerous". I'm pretty sure you're more likely to get in a car wreck in the suburbs than mugged in the inner city. Just as you have to practice safe driving in the suburbs, you have to be careful of different things in the inner city.
interesting that this is the same social dynamic that police create in less poor neighborhoods, almost as if the poorer areas were filling some sort of tribal, no-outsiders-aloud enforcement role that the police generally fill, but have neglected these areas.