Nafter

i live in a comuter / old miner village bout 6,000 population in the uk. 19 now, a lot of my old friends are "into" gang type violence, they do a lot of coke and seem every week to have big fights with weapons and fist fights with the "rivals" in the village a group of people who do a lot of herion. Theres cars being blown up, someone got kneecapped with a shotgun and a couple of stabbings over the past few years maybe something like a stabbing happenin every year or so. It seems wierd to me, as the village is small and a high middleclass/retired population it doesnt seem the sort of place stuff like this happens.

So im curious is there much violence / drug abuse where you live? as i said im in the uk but id like some insight, does this happen everywhere, does everywhere have a darkside or is it jus abnormal here? There does seem to be a anti outsiders vibe and people coming from other areas have been known to have cars jumped and smashed, anyways, whats it like where you live?

raeanna74

I live in a town of about 10,000. The next nearest town is over 20 mi away. The police reports in our weekly local newspaper number in the teens each week and on some occasions number in the single digits even. Looking at the reports for last week there's mostly domestic disputs, traffic stops, and very minor charges made. In fact in the reports there's nothing mentioning drugs this week. I think the statistics are 1 shooting in the past year.

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Strange Famous

I live in Ipswich, which is a town of aboiut 120,000 in East Anglia, UK (about 80 miles from London)

It isnt really that violent, I have lived in Coventry which was a lot rougher, in the road I used to live 2 people gopt stabbed and 2 people got raped in the 3 years I lived there, but in general it isnt that violent a place, maybe 2/3 murders a year - of course there is drugs and places that if you walked after dark you'd probably get jacked for your mobile phone, but everywhere has that.

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djtestudo

I live in Baltimore. There is so much that is nice about the city, that it's a real shame to have all the drugs and violent crime we do. We had a recent stretch where there were 300 or more murders in the city every year for ten years. The crime rate has been dropping a lot recently, especially that murder rate, but there are parts of town that I still wouldn't enter with a military escort.

Washington, too. It's just as bad down there, if not worse.

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sherpahigh

Wow, 300 or more!! I can't even fathom that. How many people in Baltimore?

Here in Calgary we had a rough start to the year with something like 6 murders in 2 or 3 months. I think we're at 7 for the year right now. That's really high for here. The city has just under a million people and it's one of the fastest growing cities in North America which explains the rise in violence. Overall it's a very friendly place. There are very few, if any, areas that I'm afraid to walk through.

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Cynthetiq

NYC... the Bronx just had the longest period of no gun violence the other week, in a decade.

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djtestudo

Around 650,000 and dropping. At least we're not Detroit.

Everyone's just a lot nicer in Canada...and the worst they have in England is drive-by arguments

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KellyC

I live in Everett, WA. Population about 100,000. Theres gotta be at least once or twice a day I hear police/ambulance/firetruck siren goes off. Usually just the normal shit I think, no real gang fights here. Although, a couple years back, theres a shooting at the local supermarket that seems to "shock the whole town." And thats pretty much it...Pretty damn peaceful the way I see about this town. I can walk by myself at 3 AM in the morning and nothing remotely bad can happen to me. Little bit boring though.....

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Wazer

I live in a town with less than 10,000 people, and if I find myself very lucky that the crime rate here is so low. There has not been any serious crime since ebfore I can remember, and as for drug abuse.. well, nothing either, unless you count the local teenagers hanging around and smoking pot.

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Rodney

College town, Santa Cruz, California. Lot of drugs, a lot of marijuana but also a lot of heroin and crystal meth -- something for every budget. Population 60,000, usually 2-4 murders a year, mostly about drugs or under the influence of drugs or by people whose brains have been so burned out by drug use that they have a hard time activing rationally even when sober. We have a moderately large and transient homeless population, and at least once a year one of them takes a dislike to another (or a liking to something the other has) and the cops find a body down by the river a few days later.

Mind you, you can walk all around this town and this action will be invisible to you unless you're looking for it. There's very little in the way of armed robbery or burglary, maybe 1-2 reported rapes a year except every five years or so some guy goes on a peeping tom/rape spree. Something about this town brings out the looney in everyone . The last serial rapist the cops caught was a well-respected property owner who just happened to be growing several thousand pot plants inside a mansion he owned, which was of course searched after he was brought up on charges. Talk about having trouble keeping a low profile....

Polyphobic

I live in the Denver metro area. Denver itself averages 8 murders per 100,000 people a year. Denvers population is 550,000. So roughly 40 murders a year. I have no clue what the whole metro area averages. We have a decent gang problem and a fair amount of drugs. Our Meth labs have been going crazy lately. There seems to be a bust of a decent sized lab every month. It's not a safe place to live but fairly typical of most US metro areas.

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Rodney

For some tasty reading, here are the murder rates per 100,000 people for all 300 or so metropolitan areas in the United States in 2001. Interesting reading; you can see how your area stacks up against othres, and you may be surprised. it's a PDF:

www.morganquitno.com/cit01rank.pdf

For example, Polyphobic, you're about right on about Denver's murder rate -- 7.9 according to these older figures, ranking #113 for murders among all metro areas -- right below New York City, which is at #112.

But you may be surprised at the cities that have higher murder rates: #89, Salt Lake City (8.7), #74 Minneapolis (11.1 #48 Los Angeles (15.6), #28 Dallas (19.7, just below Oakland and Philadelphia), #23 Kansas City Mo (23.2), #7 Washington D.C. at 40.6 (just below Detroit), #3 New Orleans at 44.0 and the grand prize winner, #1 Gary, Indiana at _79.4._ Lordy.

Figures are derived from the FBI unified crime report, which is available online at fbi.gov, but doesn't give the statistics in quite this format.

tecoyah

Woo Hoo....only 33 on the list, I thought for sure we would be in the top ten. Even buffalo was worse. The murders in this city are almost 85% African American, and I attribute the vast majority to failed education and poor public policy, You know......drugs.

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Lebell

Actually,

I've always felt quite safe in Denver.

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Sparhawk

I live near Newport News, VA. Friends of mine regularly hear gunshots. I have yet to hear them, however.

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Destrox

A small "Town" outside of Erie, PA

We just recently hit 10,000 population, and we dont even have our own police force.

It is safe here, and there is no doubt about it.

Safe, as in keep your doors and windows unlocked, safe.

While driving around here you get view choices of Farms, Trees, Small subdivisions, or the occasional business park. No industrial anything, peaceful.

I love it here.


Oh, as for the Top 300 list somone posted there, Erie PA is 201 with 3.9. (I'm actually suprised at that, oh well.)

Yes Erie, PA is where that Pizza Suicide Bomber Brian Wells thing was if you were wondering. (I doubt you were.)

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Beefimator

I live 20 minutes outside of Philly. So where I am now, I don't hear any gun shots or anything like that. But I have lived in the city. I lived in Kensington for awhile. I don't know if anyone knows anything about that part of Philly, but its not nice. I could tell you some stories that would freak you out. But I love where I live now. Nice and quite.

kurty[B]

Poly, I live in Colo Spgs. A lot like Denver, but on a much smaller scale. We have our drugs, meth has seemed to become the "popular" drug, and also what the cops have been busting down on a lot lately. I don't particularly think we have a gang problem, more of a "wannabe-gang" problem, which I think can be worse, cause often times it's teens who "wannabe" something they're not.

Had some hispanic teens at the "downtown" park flash their switchblades at me the other day, and one of them started following me across the street. I stopped in the middle of the road and made a little bit of a scene, pointed at an ambulance across the street, and told him to go ahead and try something. I stood there till he turned and walked away (lots of motorists were honking and getting angry), but figured with people being as they are, they'd only get out to help if you were blocking their means of transportation.

slimshaydee

Well I live in a city of 3-4 million and I never worry about crime, or walking the streets at night and stuff. We have some of the worst drivers in the world though here! I hate people who go 10k under the limit in the friggen right lane (we drive on the left, so the right is the fast lane)! It makes people do dangerous things to avoid them and also causes road rage.

Aborted

I live in London, pop. 7 million, where everything is so packed together and ethnically diverse that these kind of things are hard to track. They just have to be dealt with as and when they happen.

Luckily I've never had any kind of weapon turned on me in the street for money or the like, probably because I know which areas to stay away from. It's basically no more than a simple matter of common sense.

Yakk

I live in a "region" of about half-a-million and a city of under 100,000.

Edit my numbers where off.

Regional statistics: (2002 or 2001)
Violent Crime: 576 / 100,000 people
Property Crime: 4255 / 100,000 people
Murders: 0.6 / 100,000 people

Lastly, I live in the part of the region with the lowest crime rate. The region is probably an hour or two's drive in diameter.

As an aside, we spend about 100 USD/Capita on police services every year.

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imkeen

According to MSN's relocation city comparison tool:

http://houseandhome.msn.com/move/moveoverview.aspx

For West Fargo, ND:

Violent crime : 102.3 / 100k -- Nat. avg. is 496.4
The total of four crime categories: murder, rape, assault, and robbery per 100,000 residents.

Property crime : 2,110.9 / 100k -- Nat. avg. is 4532.5
The total of three crime categories; larceny, burglary, and motor vehicle theft per 100,000 residents. Arson is excluded from this category because it’s not reported in a consistent manner across the U.S.

Spritebox

I live in a town of about 80,000. A friend of mine was kidnapped the other day. He was attacked in his own home from behind and passed out. 8 hours later, he woke up in the woods with hands and feet bound. He's okay, just mentally shaken.

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hannukah harry

i'm from a city about 20 minutes from detroit, nice suburb area of about 100k people or so and growing. i think it was 2 years ago that we had our first shooting in over 20 years, which is pretty amazing considering how close we are to D-town (which i hear is on pace to set a record for number of murders in a year, not sure though if that's overal or per capita). oh, and drugs can be found pretty easily. in my high school, the two biggies were coke and pot. and lots of gambling too. no gangs to speak of though.

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MSD

Town of 60,000 cops are known to get bored. Occasionally violent crimes, but the worst we usually see are theft and vandalism. There's a semi-major city (Bridgeport) right next to us, and some of the not-so-good areas of Bridgeport are on the Fairfield border, and that's where most stuff occurs. Up near me, there was a rape/murder 15 years ago, and a manhunt for a drugged-up psycho neighbor of mine within a few years of that, but overall, we're a peaceful, boring town.

Fenton-J-Cool

Wow.. how embarassing to be the dick that broke that.

Anyway, I live in a town of about 250,000 people called Markham, Ontario. It is overall a very quiet and peaceful town, but we have a few gang-banger wannabes that create problems. However, we share a border with 'downtown' Toronto, and as a result get a ton of violent crimes occuring in our town, and unbelievably close-by.

The layering for my city/area as you get closer to Lake Ontario goes Markham, Scarborough, Toronto. Toronto is the true downtown where there's skyscrapers and bums. Markham is the american dream. There's no other way to put it... subdivisions, schools, smiling faces and ample parking.

Scarborough, however, is the buffer zone from hell. I'm sad to say it is closely linked to the middle-eastern population. The sri lankans and tamils are some of the most violent criminals that I have ever seen in my life. Using their religion as an excuse, they carry scimitars and machetes, and they use them. It's scary. I hate being on foot in any part of Scarborough, and I won't be if I can help it. I have been robbed at knifepoint there twice, and I am constantly accosted.

Also, though... I don't know how many of you heard about the Cecilia Zhang occurances, but that was my town.

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