My home is in Claremont. I picked it carefully, because I wanted a ‘good’ neighborhood. You all know what that means, right?
I wasn’t so sure that I knew what that meant. It is my habit to question everything, and I think that the idea of a ‘good’ neighborhood is potentially prejudiced. So, I wanted hard data to make the determination. What makes a neighborhood good or bad, really? It's a complicated question, but I chose to look at crime.
I went to this site to take a look at crime statistics, and just to keep it simple, I focused on murder. What I found shocked me.
How many murders does it take to be a crime wave? How much does it take to get press?
In 2003, Compton had 43 murders, Inglewood had 32, and Long Beach had 49. That is a lot of murders. But not, apparently, enough to worry about. It did not raise the alarm, not for those cities. These areas are acknowledged black neighborhoods. Known ‘hoods. And murder has come to be accepted there.
But accepted by whom, exactly?
My town, Claremont, had 0 murders. It is part of its appeal, to be quite honest; I prefer to live in a place with a low chance of being murdered.
But we share a border with a known brown town, Pomona, which has a high Latino population. Pomona had 17 murders in 2003. In 2002, there were 18 and 2001 had 19.
Claremont stayed steady at zero.
What’s up with that? A line, a two dimensional line of no thickness at all separates these two places. One side, someone murders someone else every three weeks. The other, people don’t kill each other.
People say, “Just avoid Pomona. It’s not a good neighborhood.”
But people are dying over there. Is that what we are supposed to do for our neighbors? Just avoid them when they are in trouble?
Pomona kills people. But Claremont doesn’t. What does Claremont know that Pomona doesn’t?
I almost feel like there should be an exchange program. Maybe some people from Claremont should go over and have a cultural exchange with Pomona, so the Pomona residents could learn to use alternatives to murder to solve their life situations.
Article comments
1 - AL.
Actually, poverty can drive a person to murder. Things are bad in such places. Probably worse than you can imagine. People turn to drugs, violence, and sometimes killing. I've been there. I can relate to them.
I dont know how to describe it. If each day someone came up and hit you in the face after awhile you'd grow wary of this and react. You might hit them back to make them stop. You might run and hide. But no matter what you do the person still comes up and hits you in the face. Eventually the only valid option you start to see is killing the person.
Thats what poverty is like and one of many reasons you have higher murder rates in poorer areas. Like I said, i've been there and im still in it. Sux