Suburbancrime's Journal

06/19/2008 10:20 #44716

Crime Perceptions

Here's a little article on crime perception regarding city crime.

Some interesting points include:

Despite a local tv news station under reporting city crime; over reporting suburb crime; and under reporting the race of offenders in the city and suburbs; suburbanites still conclude that the city is to be feared and African Americans in the city are to be feared.

A possible explanation is that the news channel heavily emphasizes that it is a CITY (Baltimore) news channel so therefore any crime reported via that channel is presumed to be in the city.

Those suburbanites who watch the news regularly are more likely to fear crime in the city and to decrease the amount of time they spend in the city - shopping, dining, seeings shows - to the detriment of the city economy.

Relevant to:
I wonder if suburban visitors in the Elmwood Village area has decreased due to the installation of the security cameras. It would be easy for someone in the suburbs who follows the news to conclude that crime must be out of control in this area of town if it now requires 24-7 monitoring. Any thoughts on how the 24-7 cameras might be negatively impacting the city's economy?

carolinian - 06/19/08 14:21
:::link:::

Anytime you tie revenue enhancement to law enforcement, bad stuff happens. Always.

janelle - 06/19/08 13:49
Here we go:

:::link:::

janelle - 06/19/08 13:47
I think the city already is planning on installing cameras at lights to catch people running reds. I swear I saw an article on Buffalo News about it.

The funny thing is that when cameras at lights came to Philadelphia, people were upset and argued that surveillance cameras would come next.

But here in Buffalo surveillance cameras came first and now cameras to catch red light runners. I love Buffalo, but we're so goofy about how we do things!

jason - 06/19/08 13:00
I saw an interesting story on Channel 7 late one night this week which addressed how these cameras could be used to catch people running red lights, so they can be properly fined. $3.5M could be raised from this, and does anyone believe the government won't go this route someday? All they talk about is increasing government revenue.

drew - 06/19/08 12:43
I think the cameras will have the opposite of the intended effect.

Busy streets don't need cameras.

carolinian - 06/19/08 12:12
I think any downward trend in visitation of Elmwood Village has to do more with the artsy and hip stores that define Elmwood Village being priced out of the area by inflated rents caused by higher property taxes caused by rich white suburbanites moving to Elmwood Village caused by Elmwood Village being too hip for its own damn good. I think that the cameras are really a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.

All the stores I like on Elmwood seem to be moving to Hertel these days.

06/18/2008 16:24 #44703

Sex(ual assault) in the suburbs

Sexual predators at work in the north towns suburbs of Buffalo:

I was surprised by the article regarding the convicted offender who struck again. Not because he struck again, but because historically, an offender from the suburb serves time in prison and is then released to the city into a halfway shelter or some treatment program that suburbs refuse to allow to exist in their towns. So the city ends up with more than its fair share of convicted sex offenders and sex offenders have the highest recidivism rates of all.

The suburbs should be forced to keep their sex offenders and provide treatment for them instead of dumping them in the city.

But now the cities are fighting back and enacting laws making it stricter for sex offenders to live in the city, so they're now going underground in the suburbs. Interesting.

suburbancrime - 06/19/08 09:34
And so what? How do your statistics relate to the fact that suburbs dump their sex offenders into our city?

jon - 06/19/08 09:02
:::link:::

05/13/2008 13:44 #44327

Suburbanites bring crime into our city

05/13/2008 13:40 #44326

Stealing from the church plate

Suburbanites like to steal money from churches:

05/05/2008 11:22 #44241

The greed of the suburbanites

will be their own downfall:

suburbancrime - 05/06/08 13:43
The point of this blog is just to explore this myth or idea that the suburbs are free from crime where as the city is somehow this teeming cesspool of filth and crime. I run up against people who think like this everyday...I work with them.

The blog came out of a discussion on the cameras going up on Elmwood to prevent "crime". Some of us felt that cameras going up in the city contributes to this idea that the city is always unsafe and has to be closely monitored.

For the reasons above, I don't necessarily care to compare statistics between Tonawanda and Buffalo. Not to mention, crime statistics in the suburbs are horribly, horribly skewed. A lot of suburbs will record a crime as happening in the county to avoid the crime as being part of the statistics for their area.

There do happen to be people who break the law in the city and the suburb. That's the point of of this blog. Opportunity to commit crime is an important component to why crimes occur and with the increasing vacancies in the suburbs, the people in the suburbs with an inclination towards crime, now have the opportunity to commit crime as well.

jon - 05/06/08 09:04
Although I understand your point, crime is committed by individuals who choose to break the law. And there happen to be people in both the suburbs and in the city. So of course crime will exist. And given more opportunity with abandoned homes and such, I would also guess crime will rise a bit.

Anyways, I thought I'd look around for some hard numbers about crime in our areas. Here is a 2006 comparison I found. Not sure how relevant this is to the topic at hand, but I found it interesting.

:::link:::

suburbancrime - 05/05/08 14:11
I liked this article because I think it speaks succinctly to crime being, in part, a product of a negligent environment that becomes conducive to criminal activity. The broken window theory at work in the suburbs.
I think we'll see more middle ring suburbans experiencing a rise in crime due to foreclosures and vacant properties.
The suburbs will experience what the urban cities experienced when the government turned its back on the cities and subsidized the move to the suburbs.

james - 05/05/08 12:35
I don't know why we have this Eisenhower era view that the suburbs are crime free. Hasn't everyone seen Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet?