Urban Issues and Actions

At the end of every year the Congressional Quarterly Press releases its list of the safest and most dangerous cities in the United States. The methodology of the report seems straight forward, honest and unbiased. The Congressional Quarterly Press looks at the number of crimes in a location in relation to the number of people, and the types of crime committed. The list is then shopped to different news sources for them to spread the hysteria of the dangerousness of certain cities around the United States. For those who are interested the cities which made the list are:

1.       New Orleans, LA

2.       Camden, NJ

3.       Detroit, MI

4.       St. Louis MO

5.       Oakland, CA

6.       Flint, MI

7.       Gary, IN

8.       Birmingham, AL

9.       Richmond, CA

10.   North Charleston, SC

If you take the time to Google the top ten most dangerous cities you will see news story after news story, blog after blog, about people disparaging about their city’s appearance on the list, and people bemoaning the fact that their city is not on the list, despite the amount of crime. What we do not get is the truth behind the statistics.

                The first thing to look at is how the list is presented. It is called the “Top 10 Most Dangerous Cities”, when in fact it truly represents the cities with the most felonious crimes. However, framing it as the top ten most dangerous cities adds a value judgment to it with an element of sensationalism.  The word dangerous  has certain connotations and resonates with certain groups of people, and this is what causes the list to published year after year despite the FBI not using this reporting method since 2004 due to its representational inaccuracies.

                The second point is to look at is how this may affect the people who live in these communities. While outsiders may view this list as a warning of places not to go on their next vacation, hundreds of thousands of people call this home. How can a healthy community develop if your neighborhood along with the rest of the country is constantly force-fed how dangerous you are? The media and our ‘reputable’ news sources are perpetuating a vicious cycle of a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which sociologist Robert Merton believed that if you keep reinforcing a false perception then eventually going to believe it’s true. Calling a city one of the most dangerous cities in the country immediately pushes the negative to the forefront and disguises any positive work that communities may be doing within these cities. We as a society have become so much more attracted to stories of failure as opposed to stories of success that we only want to hear the negative.

                My final problem with this list is the fact that it gives no context whatsoever. It does not mention how Detroit suffered and is still suffering from mass deindustrialization which may help account for its appearance on the list. It does not mention that New Orleans was literally devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and due to extremely slow governmental responses people are still left without homes, jobs and resources. The list does not talk about the race tensions in Richmond California and how it was heavily influenced by the second great migration during and after WWII.

                My point is, every city has a history. A set of factors which has caused it to develop into whatever it is today. No city is inherently dangerous or criminal, as this list may have you believe. In fact, most of these cities are in the situations they are in because of a complicated set of factors independent of the residents who live there. So before we subscribe to such lists why don’t we think about what these lists actually mean, and what are they doing. They are labeling a group of people who probably as dangerous, when in fact they may just be lacking the resources and infrastructure which another city may have been lucky enough to have. For this reason more people need to take classes like the Urban Crisis in America. So they can take lists like this and unpack them and look at how the variety of historical, economic and social factors intertwine to cause these cities’ conditions. And then, instead of planning on how to avoid them during your next road trip or family vacation, maybe we can start brainstorming on how we can begin to solve the problems which these cities face.

 http://os.cqpress.com/citycrime/CityCrime2008_Rank_Rev.pdf

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 1:53 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.