People's Definition of Safety/Danger?

Parents Forum
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<p>I’m having a really hard time understanding some people’s definition of a “dangerous area” or a “safe area”. I’ve seen people on here say that schools like University of Chicago or Northwestern are located in bad neighborhoods. Having personally spent a lot of time in both Hyde Park and Evanston, I find these assumptions to be absolutely ridiculous (If Hyde Park is good enough for the Obamas before they had Secret Service, it’s safe enough for you). </p>

<p>I just wonder what criteria are being used to come to these conclusions about an area’s safety? What is your definition of “safe”?</p>

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<p>I guess people are comparing it to where they live?</p>

<p>I’m going to UPenn next year. People tell me West Philly is dangerous…but when I went to visit, I felt perfectly safe walking around (trying to find food, haha) with 3 other pre-freshmen at like 12 at night. I don’t feel safe doing that where I live.</p>

<p>For reference, I live in one of the most dangerous areas in my country, lol.</p>

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<p>I think people from well-manicured suburbs, perhaps especially from parts of the country where gated communities are common, find anything that looks urban suspect. I thought the U. of Chicago area looked remarkably upscale, though when we took the bus back to Midway Airport we clearly went through parts of town that weren’t. I went to Columbia in the middle of the crack epidemic, my apartment was roach heaven and the pops coming from Morningside Park weren’t firecrackers. Everything seems safe to me now!</p>

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<p>That’s probably true that people compare areas to where they live. My daughter walks through Harlem on her way to high school every day, so a college would have to be in a pretty bad area for us to consider it “not safe”.</p>

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<p>I can’t believe that anyone would say that Evanston is a “bad” area. The areas around campus are about as upscale as you can get. Of course, you have to be street smart in almost any setting, but that’s just common sense.</p>

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<p>My mom has an urban phobia, I think. She is a court reporter, so she gets all the nitty gritty details of a lot of the violent crime in the Detroit area and it scares her.</p>

<p>Personally, I am accustomed to living in an area where you pretty much don’t have to worry about crime more serious than idiot teenagers going into unlocked cars for forgotten ipods. I don’t feel safe outside of that environment. I can, however, adapt to an environment where you are not very likely to be bothered during the day or in the early evening if you’re in a well lit area and/or in a group, or utilizing similar common sense safety strategies. My boyfriend is from an area where having your house broken into in the middle of the day or having your car stolen is always a complete possibility and that danger is just something you numb yourself to, and I can’t imagine that. Areas where I feel like there are things I can do to keep myself safe, and places that are pretty much fine during the day, are safe enough in my book-- but I don’t know how BF lived where he grew up.</p>

<p>Interestingly, I’d have thought my BF would be extremely street-smart, and he is a COMPLETE moron about that kind of thing. I guess he has just had to make himself so numb to the danger that he doesn’t even acknowledge it, especially in neighborhoods that are quite bad by all accounts but not as bad as his hometown. Like, for example, we were walking at night once and I wanted to take a certain route because it was better lit and more populated, and he went, “WHY!???” And when he gets into the car, he gets in, buckles his seat belt, starts the car, fiddles with the radio, adjusts his mirrors, and THEN shuts and locks the door. It makes me CRAZY! Or if it’s like 4am and we pull into a parking lot and there is one car in the entire lot which is running and has a shady looking guy in it, he will ALWAYS park next to the one car even when the entire lot is open, and has no clue why I would object. It blows my mind that he could be like that.</p>

<p>Because of people like my mom, who are afraid of everything, and my boyfriend-- who is completely oblivious to all danger, I don’t trust anyone else’s determinations of “safe.” I read the crime statistics myself if I want to know.</p>

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<p>We live in a quiet suburb, one of the safest communities (based on FBI crime statistics) in the country. Nevertheless, we thought that the area around Penn was fine and our daughter would love to attend college there. Now the drive from Swarthmore to Penn was an eye opener. But the area around Penn was fine and we would not be concerned about our daughter living there.</p>

<p>I think that teenagers, at least some of them, just want to do something different and if they grow up in a quiet community a big city sounds exciting.</p>

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<p>There are crime logs that will give you a list of reported crimes in a given area. I have seen areas that have crimes stats broken down by incidents in that square mile or so. I have not check these things carefully. Even they are not that correct because when colleges can and do gerrymander borders making sometimes stopping short close to the college owned property but extending into safer areas. </p>

<p>Duquesne University is a good example of a school with 3 borders that are very upscale and safe, with a third one going into some treacherous territory. All well and good except that stretch of territory is what is between that school and Oakland which is College Town and kids tend to want to go back and forth from there. </p>

<p>Though terrible crimes can occur anywhere, they do have propensities in some areas more than others.</p>

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<p>My daughter lives in Philly and works at Penn. As in most of Philly you do have to be careful and use your street smarts. There have been armed robberies, but generally not in the middle of the daytime and not for people walking around in groups. The campus area is very compact.</p>

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<p>Crime happens everywhere. Way back when, we knew enough to be careful in the medium size, midwestern city where I went to college. There is crime in the suburb where I now live as well as in my small hometown. My D attends college in a large city and I don’t really feel that it is any more dangerous there. You just need to be aware.</p>

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<p>My younger d attended an inner city high school on a street with a fair
amount of driveby shootings ,criminal activity and assaults of students coming to/from the local bus stop. My car was broken in the school parking lot one spring (while the track team was practicing nearby)& I had literally only stepped away for a few minutes.
That said, the criminal activity * was not the neighborhood* to me. I was fine with her taking the bus & eating lunch in the neighborhood shops.
I do admit however , that if she had chosen to attend college in a similar neighborhood, that would have given me pause.</p>

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<p>In a lot of ways, I feel safer in the city than I do in my suburb now that I have returned. My suburb doesn’t have streetlights throughout most of the city and its pitch black, and if I am on the street I can’t hop on a bus for a quick getaway because there are no buses. As far as I am aware we have a pretty solid police force, but the area is so spread out that I don’t see a whole lot of police presence even though I know they’re there. While the crime rate here is distinctly lower than most of the cities I know, there is very little I can do out here to protect myself from those freak things that can happen anywhere. If I choose to go out at night I am largely just counting on that low crime rate to protect me, wheras in the city it’d be a lot easier to be proactive. I think those sorts of issues are things people with little urban experience don’t consider, it’s not just a higher crime rate and the same set of circumstances-- it’s often easier to be safe in the city even despite the crime rate. Better lighting, businesses being closer together, more police, more people, that all makes a big difference.</p>

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<p>Also , she is attending college in a small city, that is fairly bucolic. Even so,students have been accosted by an armed robber who is apparently targeting the ones who live just off campus-like my daughter.</p>

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<p>I’ve often wondered about this as well. My S went to Johns Hopkins and if I’ve heard it once I’ve heard a thousand times that it is “unsafe”.</p>

<p>LOL. Just north of campus is the most upscale residential neighborhood in the city (Roland Park). West of campus is Wyman Park and then Hampden, which is a formerly working class (somewhat still so) area now being gentrified by young professionals. All kinds of hip shops and eateries mixed in. South of campus leads eventually to downtown and Inner Harbor. Immediate east of campus is Charles Village - shops, restaurants. But just a couple of blocks east of that… well, you start running into a lot of people of color and a lower economic vibe.</p>

<p>I think some people equate poorer areas with “unsafe.” Some are probably truly racist, but some just don’t realize that a lot of black faces walking/bussing to and from work every day… are just like you and me, and not at all dangerous, focused on earning a living, their families…</p>

<p>I think these people feel a safe area is where everyone seems just like them.</p>

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<p>Weird. A lot of people don’t want to park next to any other car because the possibility of door dings.</p>

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<p>With urban campuses, I think as a parent you have to take notice, because the kids are mostly oblivious to danger. I’m from Chicago, and I’d consider both Northwestern & U of C campuses to be fine during the day and in groups. I went to University of Illinois-Chicago for a year & know that at night that area’s a different animal. FWIW, I was also a little concerned when D1 and myself visited Saint Louis U. a few years ago. Not ON campus, but just outside the perimeter. And that was at 7AM.</p>

<p>Very easy to do due diligence & find crime demographics for any area–that will tell the tale more than anything else.</p>

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<p>Many years ago, our next door neighbor’s kid was the concertmistress of the Central High School orchestra here. There was a big to-do, because the orchestra had plans to go to a youth orchestra competition in Vienna, and the State Department had just put out a notice warning people that airport security in Vienna was not up to international standards, and that there was a risk of terrorism in Vienna. A number of the parents wanted to pull their kids out of the orchestra trip, or to have the whole thing cancelled.</p>

<p>Now, those of you who know Philadelphia know that Central – the second-oldest public high school in the country, after Boston Latin – is a great school, but it sure isn’t in a great neighborhood. It’s in a part of North Philadelphia called Olney, and while Olney doesn’t look as bombed-out as the most depopulated parts of the city, its crime statistics are actually much higher, because it actually has people living, working, and going to school in it. Most of the kids at Central take public transportation to get there, and many of them take the subway and walk a good half mile to the school from the very, very urban subway stop. </p>

<p>The kids’ parents didn’t want to let them go to Vienna, because it was so dangerous. Trust me, 98% of the population of Vienna would have a heart attack if they found themselves at the subway station these kids used twice a day, every day. </p>

<p>The key is familiarity. When you know an area, and know its risks, you can evaluate them pretty accurately, and structure your behavior to minimize them. (Of course, sometimes you can’t minimize them enough, or you have to restrict your activities a lot in order to stay safe, and neither of those is a good thing.) When you don’t know the area, you are always on Defcon 5, and you wildly overestimate the degree of threat you face.</p>

<p>That’s what happens with Chicago, Penn, and lots of other places. They are fine – not perfect, but fine. But if you aren’t familiar with an urban landscape, or an urban landscape outside of a squeaky-clean business district, they can seem menacing and scary. And students there are at risk for petty crime now and then – purse snatchings, bike snatchings, getting panhandled. Nothing as bad as the risks suburban kids fact from drunk driving (themselves or others), but then suburban parents have other ways to cope with the drunk driving issue, and it doesn’t bother them as much, even if it should.</p>

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<p>This is an interesting thread. I do agree with many of the posters that one learns to be savvy in certain environments and that what we consider “safe” has to do with what we are accustomed to. That said, the environment will have a big impact on the college experience. When I was at Yale (many, many eons ago- so maybe some has changed), the crime rate was astounding. I was in graduate school, but even amongst the undergraduates we knew, virtually EVERYONE had experienced some event- mugging, robbery, etc. The “bad” areas were very close to the campus and medical school. A colleague had his jaw broken taking money out of an ATM at 10 in the morning. I had money stolen out of a backpack in a lab where a 200-lb post-doc was working (and yes, there was security at the entrance to the building). You could not walk at night-even a couple of blocks by yourself. Yes, shuttles were provided. But if you were in the lab at night, you had to wait for that shuttle. It certainly was not the carefree approach I had as an undergraduate. It took me quite a while to stop looking over my shoulder after moving to another city. So, while I think that colleges do their best to provide a safe environment, the students really do need to be more careful in some locations and freedom is somewhat curtailed.</p>

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<p>Chicago has seemed much safer than San Francisco, to me. That goes double for the public transportation.</p>

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<p>Exactly. When the cousins from the PNW come to visit, they are amazed that my kids take the train/subway down to the Phillies games. “Aren’t subways dangerous? Doesn’t everyone get mugged?”</p>

<p>However, those same cousins think nothing of going off on a three day hiking/camping trip. And my girls say “Aren’t there coyotes and bears and snakes? You sleep outside?”</p>