Every single city subreddit and local discussion is focused on crime and how high it is.
1: In almost all cases the statistics show that crime is actually going down, but the media reporting is going up.
2: Cities being crime-ridden hellholes is a narrative that is very convenient to the North American conservative narrative that cities are hellholes, progressives are soft on crime, the "real" citizens are in the suburban/rural areas who are scared, and that they are justified to be scared.
It's how despite the fact that overall trends of policy perspectives are moving leftward, the US Republicans and Canadian Conservatives remain relevant disproportionate to the polls for their actual policies: They feed on the fear so they create more of it.
3: West Coast cities (San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Vancouver Canada) get hit with this even more disproportionately because the citizens there confuse crime with visible poverty.
People hear "Someone was randomly stabbed", then they go on the streets, see someone homeless and on opiates passed out in the street, or get screamed about by someone on meth, feel unsafe, and correlate the two. Then they look around at the state of certain parts of the cities and scream the city is dying, and demand superficial solutions like impeaching the DA, or cleaning up a homeless encampment.
But the cities don't have a crime problem (more than other cities in North America). They have a VISIBLE POVERTY problem. They have a houselessness problem. And they have a drug addiction problem (which almost certainly is an outcome of poverty and houselessness.
The root cause for these is complex, from wealth imbalance, to insufficient social services, but the reason why THOSE CITIES specifically have them is that the west coast provinces and states are 1/ Progressive, 2/ Mild-climated in the Winter.
There is no other province or state that is both consistently progressive (and as a result offers SOME social services for homeless, mentally ill, or drug addicted people) AND you can survive a winter in the street. The east coast has the former, but not the latter. The southwest has the latter but not the former.
The combination of the above creates the effect you see.
"In almost all cases the statistics show that crime is actually going down, but the media reporting is going up."
No, the statistics show that reports to the police are going down. The reports are NOT going down because crime is going down; they are going down because victims are less and less likely to report the crimes.
1: In almost all cases the statistics show that crime is actually going down, but the media reporting is going up.
2: Cities being crime-ridden hellholes is a narrative that is very convenient to the North American conservative narrative that cities are hellholes, progressives are soft on crime, the "real" citizens are in the suburban/rural areas who are scared, and that they are justified to be scared.
It's how despite the fact that overall trends of policy perspectives are moving leftward, the US Republicans and Canadian Conservatives remain relevant disproportionate to the polls for their actual policies: They feed on the fear so they create more of it.
3: West Coast cities (San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Vancouver Canada) get hit with this even more disproportionately because the citizens there confuse crime with visible poverty.
People hear "Someone was randomly stabbed", then they go on the streets, see someone homeless and on opiates passed out in the street, or get screamed about by someone on meth, feel unsafe, and correlate the two. Then they look around at the state of certain parts of the cities and scream the city is dying, and demand superficial solutions like impeaching the DA, or cleaning up a homeless encampment.
But the cities don't have a crime problem (more than other cities in North America). They have a VISIBLE POVERTY problem. They have a houselessness problem. And they have a drug addiction problem (which almost certainly is an outcome of poverty and houselessness.
The root cause for these is complex, from wealth imbalance, to insufficient social services, but the reason why THOSE CITIES specifically have them is that the west coast provinces and states are 1/ Progressive, 2/ Mild-climated in the Winter.
There is no other province or state that is both consistently progressive (and as a result offers SOME social services for homeless, mentally ill, or drug addicted people) AND you can survive a winter in the street. The east coast has the former, but not the latter. The southwest has the latter but not the former.
The combination of the above creates the effect you see.