TonyR wrote:Vorpal wrote:I lived in or near a number of neighborhoods in the USA that other people would say were bad neighborhoods. I am absolutely convinced form my experience that 99% of what people believe about 'bad' neighborhoods is mainly prejudice, fed by urban stories and myths.
Neighborhoods that look run down, or populated mainly by minorities are just that. The run down look can be largely attributed to absentee landlords. It doesn't make the neighborhoods unsafe or the people bad.
If America is bizarre, it is mainly in the lack of a social safety net that produces such neighborhoods.
True but the difference from such areas in the UK is the drug and crime cultures that gravitate to such areas are armed and conditioned to using them. They don't have much of a problem with tourists because they generally don't go to such areas and a lot of the killings are internal feuds but when they do there can be problems - vide the deaths of two British tourists in Florida a few years ago when they ended up in the wrong area late at night - especially if you happen across an addict looking to gethis next fix. When I am in the US I do take care of where I go and don't go and check because the lines are moving all the time.
What I am saying is that the drug and crime cultures simply aren't as prevalent as people think. Your example of the British tourists is an *extremely* uncommon occurrence. Yes, there are places where it's adviseable that non residents just don't go. But there aren't as many of them as people think. The neighborhoods where I lived weren't really bad. They were minority. Most were ethnically mixed. One neighborhood where I lived outside Chicago was largely hispanic. One of my colleagues said it was stupid of me to live there because of the 'gang bangers'. You know what? I never once saw any evidence of criminal activity, unless you count a little grafitti. No drugs, no guns, no robberies, nothing. I didn't feel nervous late at night; I never even had a car broken into there, which is more than I can say of some of the 'nice' neighborhoods I lived in.
The vast majority of those murders are done by someone who knows the victim. Roughly 16% are people who are killed by an intimate partner, and 20% are people who intervened in a domestic dispute. Most of the remaining are arguments, or revenge killings. The numbers of gang related killings, although certainly higher in major cities than elsewhere, were estimated to be be between 15 & 18% in 2011 -2012*. You have to keep in mind, though, that any numbers estimating the numbers of deaths due to gang violence have to be treated with a great deal of caution, as they are based upon 'on the ground' information. It's not as though gang members report violence in their jurisdictions.
In other words, the chance that a tourist would be killed is very, very small, even if s/he does wander into the wrong neighborhood. Most tourists killed in the USA die from exposure or drowning or something while they are fishing, hunting, hiking, etc. Not from violence. Those two British deaths in Miami were newsworthy because they are so very unusual.
p.s. for anyone who is interested, there is a website that tracks tourist deaths. It's at
http://touristkilled.com/* https://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/surv ... g-problems
“In some ways, it is easier to be a dissident, for then one is without responsibility.”
― Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom