EveryBlock is a good website for looking up statistics in unfamiliar neighborhoods in the greater New York City area. Crime will always be in any city but it's night and day compared to the time when this Bespoke Blogger moved to Manhattan for college in 1990. A reader recently questioned if Hamilton Heights was relatively "quiet" and residential. By checking the crime report from the last week, one will find a total of 11 reported major crimes at West Harlem's 30th Precinct. What's it like further downtown in the same time frame? Prime Upper West Side had over double the number at 23 crimes reported, the pricey Carnegie Hill nabe had 45 crimes on record, prestigious Gramercy had 46, gentrified Chelsea had 32 and Midtown had 60 call-outs overall. If you think about it, these areas further downtown are just more dense in population so the amount of crime is bound to be higher when the city's overall rates start to level off. Go to the EveryBlock website to see the numbers on the interactive map (zoom in for specific nabes): LINK. On a final note, regardless of what neighborhood one lives in, you are still in the big city, so there's a certain amount of everyday awareness that applies.
Thanks for posting this, especially as a response to the commenter who prompted the whole discussion with his/her ignorance. I have found myself having this conversation many times over the years in which I have lived in various neighborhoods above 100th Street(or wherever the magical cut off is that delineates "safe" to these people) and I am always shocked by how readily people write off whole areas as crime-ridden when they have likely never even visited, let alone lived there. To echo your sentiment, crime happens all over town. It happens all over the world, too. If people have concerns about the amount of actual crime that takes place in a given location, they should look at the statistics, rather than going with whatever hysterical notions they have conjured up in their own minds about so-called "bad neighborhoods." That sort of thinking smacks of racism and classism and it pisses me off! (If you couldn't tell)
ReplyDeleteThanks for the insider view. We also feel the same and folks just have to be careful in their daily routine no matter where they live.
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