Awesome Every Day

Neighborhood Crime

lepus:

awesome-everyday:

Okay, here we go.

[snip]

40217 check in. I’m right on the border of Smoketown and Germantown/Schnitzleburg.  

And you better believe crime happens here.  The sad part 85% of it is people stealing from their neighbors.  

Reblogged for additional context to my previous post.

Neighborhood Crime

Okay, here we go.

I am doing a bit of research about a historically black neighborhood called Smoketown. I’m reading articles, looking up what kind of history the houses have and just basically absorbing knowledge.

Then I came across this article from 2010 about crime.

Here’s an excerpt from the short piece:

A study by Neighborhoodscout.com ranked the Smoketown neighborhood; specifically East Breckinridge Street in zip codes 40203 and 40204 as the 14th most dangerous of the 17,000 cities.

The report says zip codes 40203 and 40204 have the highest crime rate in Louisville. It says there are 226 predicted annual crimes in the neighborhood and that a person’s chances of being a victim of a violent crime there within a year are one in nine.

Hey, guess what?

I used to live in zip code 40204. 

40204 is mostly located in a neighborhood called The Highlands as shown in this map. It’s a place with coffee shops, white folks and where the second hand shops are called vintage.  

The Highlands is a Louisville neighborhood far more affluent than the Smoketown neighborhood (Here’s a picture of Bardstown Road in 40204… there are two restaurants facing each other that serve 25 dollar bottles of wine).

And guess what? Crime happens there! A lot! My roommate’s car got broken into. I know people who’ve been assaulted. Even worse, women have been threatened or actually raped in The Highlands, near locally owned coffee shops.

But they don’t want to pin the crime of 40204 on the Highlands neighborhood, which is enraging.