So you've spoken to a large number of the hundreds of thousands of African Americans who live in the neighborhoods most plagued by crime and know that they don't complain about it? It just has to be some derogatory classification of subgroup such as "old white people", As if the hundreds of murders per year were little more than something for them to whine about?
>Chicago has a significant crime delta between neighborhoods that, if one were to read about it, can only be thought of in terms of extreme racial injustice.
"Only" in terms of racial injustice? So those violent crime numbers by neighborhood are entirely the fault of the aforementioned white people? The people actually committing them in these neighborhoods have no agency or fault in what they do to their own neighborhoods? This logic just keeps getting more twisted in the absurdities it has to push to sustain itself. Doubtless there is racial injustice in a U.S. city with a famously corrupt police/civil administration like Chicago, but in recent decades Chicago has had multiple black mayors and a large percentage of its government and police are staffed by African Americans or people of color in general. Yet they somehow have had no say or co-responsibility for anything that has remained problematic?
It is more or less simply the case that people who work in the tech industry, the kinds of people who are choosing whether to live in Chicago or Austin or Portland or San Francisco, are not living in the neighborhoods where it's unsafe to walk to school or to set foot in the park after sundown. Lawndale and Lakeview might as well be different cities.
There is bleed --- increasingly --- from rough neighborhoods to the wealthier ones, especially with respect to property crime, but also with robberies. But there are robberies all over San Francisco, too. If you're choosing between those two cities, violent crime is probably not a meaningful metric for you.
Basically a strawman but whatever, I pointed out that this person was obviously white(the culture comment, growing up in Evanston) and lived in Lake View, two places I will call light on crime compared to South Side. OP is trying to describe Chicago as crime-ridden - when in actuality they would have never lived anywhere near the actual crime epicenters of Chicago and are only operating on fear-mongering.
>Only" in terms of racial injustice? So those violent crime numbers by neighborhood are entirely the fault of the aforementioned white people? The people actually committing them in these neighborhoods have no agency or fault in what they do to their own neighborhoods?
Again, a strawman, but whatever. If you want to paint the problems of an entire area on someone/some group, then the government that dominates your local area is the best option.
>This logic just keeps getting more twisted in the absurdities it has to push to sustain itself.
When you twist everyone's words to misrepresent them and make them illogical, are you shocked that you get lemonade from lemons?
>Doubtless there is racial injustice in a U.S. city with a famously corrupt police/civil administration like Chicago, but in recent decades Chicago has had multiple black mayors and a large percentage of its government and police are staffed by African Americans or people of color in general
That's right, because there have been three black mayors since 1983 and because there is no more explicit policy of racism in the Chicago PD no policies that were formulated by racism, or economic impacts from racism exist anymore.
Besides being a pretty low-quality, racist comment overall (e.g., "I pointed out that this person was obviously white(the culture comment, growing up in Evanston) and lived in Lake View"), this specific bit of reasoning is particularly poorly-reasoned. Two things can be true: north-side Chicago can be crime ridden compared to other places and also it can have less crime than South-Side Chicago. The latter doesn't refute the former.
This doesn't appear to be responding to anything I said - I said they didn't live near the actual crime epicenters of Chicago and thus couldn't accurately comment on it. Chicago, as an urban area, will have higher crime rates just by population rate - that doesn't actually mean they lived in a high crime area.
>Besides being a pretty low-quality, racist comment overall (e.g., "I pointed out that this person was obviously white(the culture comment, growing up in Evanston) and lived in Lake View"
I am white - if it's racist to point out how resoundingly white OPs bias and POV is then so be it. Go read that comment back, along with the culture comment and now living in rural Colorado - connect the dots or not. I know tons of white people that used to live here that no longer do because they don't feel it's "a nice place to live anymore."
The parent didn't claim to live near "the epicenter of crime" nor does one need to live near the epicenter to find that crime is too high for their liking. Your comment was a non sequitur (responding to "crime is too high in Chicago" with "you don't live near the epicenter").
> I am white - if it's racist to point out how resoundingly white OPs bias and POV is then so be it. Go read that comment back, along with the culture comment and now living in rural Colorado - connect the dots or not. I know tons of white people that used to live here that no longer do because they don't feel it's "a nice place to live anymore."
Yes, I read the comment correctly the first time. Assuming someone's race and then assuming that the person's race impacts how they see the world is racism. Writing someone off because of their race is racism.
Chicago is really segregated. It's very easy to forget that one's experience in an expensive, largely-white, progressive, north-side neighborhood isn't representative of the city as a whole. Moreover, if the only "diverse" people you speak with are those who have had good educations, landed well-paying jobs, moved to a nice north-side neighborhood, and so on, you might not realize that they aren't representative of "diverse" communities more broadly (particularly when the portrait painted by the media differs so much from reality). TL;DR--we have to be careful when we generalize about "what life is like in Chicago" because it's easy to extrapolate our own experiences onto tons of people who live in neighborhoods that don't remotely resemble our own (and I strongly suspect that's what's happening when the OP says "most of the people I hear complain about crime are old white people that don't live here any more").
Unless "old" is >29, there are plenty of people who still complain about crime in Chicago including many black people (black communities have been most impacted by the 2014-onward crime wave). But Chicago is a segregated city, so the cushier, largely white, progressive neighborhoods are more insulated from both crime and minority opinion about crime. There are definitely lots of Fox News listeners who complain about Chicago's crime (my father-in-law being among them), but while the Fox caricature might be inaccurate, crime is still very much an issue even to the "old" 30+ crowd of various races and ethnicities.
By the numbers, it's safer to be a professional in Chicago than it was at any point in the 1990s, where this wasn't part of the national conversation.
But a movement towards criminal justice reform (which started out bipartisan, with Koch support!) elected a bunch of high-profile reformist prosecutors and shifted everyone's attention towards police oversight at exactly the least congenial time, on the eve of a bunch of exogenous shocks (the pandemic, the economy, the full flowering of a disastrous anti-gang policing strategy) that juiced violent crime.
There's political hay to be made of the crime numbers (Chicago's are far from the worst of all the metro areas in the US, but we're such a large city that the decontextualized numbers are easy to sell on TV), and easy sides to take --- the defunders on one end, the "tough on crime" conservatives on the other, here to make the case that Chicago (and Philly and San Francisco) fucked up by electing reformist Democrats to prosecutor posts, and so now crime is the first word out of everyone's mouth when it comes to this city.
Notably, none of that attention has anything to do with improving the lot of the people who live in Lawndale or South Shore; the national conversation basically boils down to whether we should create National Guard cordons around these areas, or whether we should instead abolish the police departments in these neighborhoods. It's a joke, not a public policy debate.
We're not going to resolve any of it on this thread. It sounds callous to say this because it is callous, but it is also, non-normatively, the descriptive correct answer for professionals wondering about how crime in Chicago would effect them: if you don't live in the hardest neighborhoods in Chicago, it's unlikely to be meaningfully different from any other comparably dense urban area.
> But a movement towards criminal justice reform (which started out bipartisan, with Koch support!) elected a bunch of high-profile reformist prosecutors and shifted everyone's attention towards police oversight at exactly the least congenial time, on the eve of a bunch of exogenous shocks (the pandemic, the economy, the full flowering of a disastrous anti-gang policing strategy) that juiced violent crime
Chicago's crime began surging back in 2014-2015, and I'm pretty sure the likes of Fox News were happy to talk about it back then (certainly I recall my father-in-law ranting about it around that time). The idea that they waited until there were confounding factors like the pandemic to talk about it probably has no bearing in truth, although I'm sure they boosted that topic again in 2020 and 2021 when Chicago homicides soared to ~30-year highs (as they did all over the country).
> Notably, none of that attention has anything to do with improving the lot of the people who live in Lawndale or South Shore;
In fairness, it's not like the conditions of people in those neighborhoods abruptly fell off in 2014 such that it would explain the surge in violent homicides. If you're interested in reversing the surge (which is probably where most of the opportunity lies, assuming that if something can drive crime to surge so dramatically/quickly, that perhaps it can be similarly made to decline dramatically/quickly), you're probably going to look at the causes of the surge rather than investing more in education in those communities in the hopes that it will yield a positive return in ~10 years.
And yes, there were changes that have explanatory power over the increase in gang homicides on the south and west sides; a string of them, in fact. The atomization of the large "institutional" Chicago gangs, the disinvestment and flight from the roughest neighborhoods to suburbs in the south and west, and, yes, the way CPD managed the problem, "flooding the zone" in whatever the most recent hot-spot while leaving other problematic areas to fester. A lot of this is Chicago's fault.
But it has not at all much to do with the quality of life for professionals in the city. For most families that live in Portage Park, South Shore might as well be in Indiana.
That context isn't helpful for someone who is considering where to live. I don't care what crime rates were in a city 30 years ago, I care how a given city's crime rates compare to other places today (and possibly in the foreseeable future).
> But it has not at all much to do with the quality of life for professionals in the city.
I take your point that, in a segregated city like Chicago, the north-side crime rates are going to be a lot lower than the city average, but I'm pretty sure rates are rising in virtually all neighborhoods.
You came to this discussion with a data point that clearly isn't meaningful. You don't even need empirical data to see that; logic is enough to tell you that you can't deduce quality of life from "crime is up". Up from where? But, to be helpful, I've provided that context for you.
> You came to this discussion with a data point that clearly isn't meaningful. You don't even need empirical data to see that; logic is enough to tell you that you can't deduce quality of life from "crime is up".
... it seems like you think I'm arguing "rates are up over the last decade and thus quality of life must be bad overall". My argument is that crime rates are high overall (tenth worst of the top 100 big cities) and on a worsening trajectory. The near-term trajectory (i.e., the last ~decade) is important because we don't live in a city from moment to moment, but we will likely be in a city for 5 or more years. I also don't purport to claim that crime rates tell you everything about a place's quality of life, in case that wasn't clear. Yes, it is unlikely that a professional will live in the worst neighborhoods in Chicago, but they're also less likely to live in the worst neighborhoods in any other city they might move to.
You could credibly argue that Chicago's more segregated nature means more variation in crime rates between the worst and the best neighborhoods, which I completely believe (and consequently I also consider more qualitative assessments of cities in addition to a strictly numerical approach considering the dearth of data).
Also, for anyone not from around here, Chicago has a significant crime delta between neighborhoods that, if one were to read about it, can only be thought of in terms of extreme racial injustice. 0: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/2013_Chi...