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In Which I Complain About This City
Or: An Urbanite's Lament
So a few days ago I mentioned that I was going to get around to typing up some stories about my time living, studying, and working in an urban area you have heard of because of its crime rate. This was reasonably well received, and clearly there is an appetite for this sort of post here. So, here we go. I have spent the last several years of my life living and working in an American city with a very high rate of both property and violent crime. Our police force is largely useless, and spends no time enforcing laws against "quality of life" crimes. Litter is everywhere, and red lights are regarded by many of our drivers as suggestions. Urban blight is everywhere. I spent about a year working part-time at a local courthouse, across the street from which was a block of rowhouses which had clearly suffered more than one fire in the past several years, and through every single one's top floor windows you could clearly see the sky. Until this year our murder clearance rate hovered around 45%, and I'm sure that the recent boost is the result of some creative accounting with regards to cold cases. The police operate under a federal consent decree, imposed in 2017, which they are pleased to inform everyone they achieved 25% compliance with just this year!
Yes my friends, I lived and worked in Charm City. You know it from The Wire, and from the 7-o'clock news.
Baltimore.
Baltimore is a shithole. There's no two ways about it. The subreddit is full of yuppies who live in Mount Vernon or Fed Hill or one of the 5 other safe clean neighborhoods in the city, who will insist up down and sideways that they actually like the city. The food is great! There's so much to do! It's vibrant! There's an art scene! Bullshit. All of it. Utter crap. This city is a shithole. Not a diamond in the rough, not an up-and-comer, not a "if you just tried it" grungy but fun place to live. It's not New York in the 90s, where it's a little rough but if you just give it a chance you'll fall in love. It's a hive of scum and villainy.
I won't bore you with reciting those facts you can find out from a simple google search. How the Gun Trace Task Force was a case study in corruption. How a mayor was arrested and sentenced for various corruption charges. How in the last week alone there have been 84 aggravated assaults, 62 robberies, 17 carjackings, 6 shootings, and 3 homicides. Instead I'll just tell you some of my personal experiences. Things I have seen, or heard, or which were related to me by a friend or coworker.
It is my first week of living in Baltimore. I am tentatively optimistic about this city. After all, if it bleeds it leads. Things can't possibly be as bad as it's portrayed on the news. There's no reason to judge the city before I've had a chance to really experience it. I am talking about this with some of my fellow students. Most of us agree that things are probably exaggerated, and we should form our own opinions. One of my classmates pipes up. She heard gunfire outside her apartment last night. When she got up this morning to come to classes, she found a bullet hole in her car.
It is my first month of living in Baltimore. I am beginning to think that perhaps things are not being exaggerated. One of my friends is having a party. "Just don't use the main entrance to the building" he says in his invitation. "Junkies like to hang out around there. Use the garage." I go to the party. A fellow partygoer mentions he didn't like that the host used the word "junkies" because he feels it is dismissive of people who just need help. A few hours later the group-chat gets a text. Then another. Then another. Then another. Five in all, each more frantic than the last. One of the girls stepped out for a smoke and can't get back in. Some of the aforementioned junkies are harassing her. Three of us leave to get her. One stays by the door, two more go to where she is, and escort her back inside the building. She is crying. The party ends shortly after.
It is my second month of living in Baltimore. I am awoken at midnight by the sound of revving engines. I peek through the blinds. There is a horde of young men riding dirt bikes driving down the street. At least thirty of them, possibly as many as fifty. I do not know at this time that this is a regular occurrence, so I shrug it off and go back to sleep. This will continue to happen sporadically throughout the rest of my time in the city.
It is my third month of living in Baltimore. I am awoken at 2am by the sound of gunfire. I am nervous. I've never heard gunfire outside of a range before. Eventually I go back to sleep. It is not the last time this will happen.
It is my fourth month of living in Baltimore. I have walked to a nearby McDonalds because I'm tired and don't feel like cooking. Before heading in I smoke a cigarette. A local junkie asks for one. I hand him one, and the lighter. He lights the cigarette and begins to walk off. I ask for my lighter back. He begins screaming, pleading, begging me to keep the lighter. He is wailing like a child. Sickened, I wave him off and tell him to keep the damn thing. Like a switch was flipped he immediately stops, and walks away. I know I've been hustled, but for the life of me I can't bring myself to give a shit. I take my burger and fries to go.
It is my sixth month of living in Baltimore. I have yet to find a decent pizza place. This irritates me more than it should. My phone buzzes. I scan the email briefly. It's from the campus police. There was a shooting on school property. No students were involved, so I don't bother reading the whole email. I've gotten a similar email before. I will receive two more before my first year in this city is over.
It is my eighth month of living in Baltimore. One of my professors kindly informs us that it is a matter of when, not if, we are mugged. He suggests all the things he is allowed to suggest. Keep your head on a swivel. Don't wear earbuds in both ears. Don't walk alone at night. Don't go out at all after midnight. Comforted by the knowledge that the only place in the city I go without a gun is the school, I mostly tune this litany of advice out. I've heard it all before, from more than one source.
It is my twelfth month of living in Baltimore. I have accepted a part time position. Every Monday, I go down to the courthouse, arriving before 8:30am. I begin to recognize some of the
junkies and crackheadsindigent citizens along my morning commute. One of them regularly masturbates himself in full view of traffic. I have rather unimaginatively nicknamed him "jack-off" in my head.It is my thirteenth month of living in Baltimore. Every day on my drive home I pass a large banner advertising temp tags from Virginia. This is an illegal service, intended to circumvent the costs of registering a car and getting insurance in Maryland, or at least getting around having a suspended license, or no license. The banner is at least four feet high, and ten feet across.
It is my fifteenth month of living in Baltimore. I am cut off on the freeway coming back from grocery shopping, and honk my horn. The driver swerves out of traffic, and begins driving along next to me, matching my speed. I slow down, he slows down. I speed up, he speeds up. I look over, and he is screaming at me from the driver's seat of his car. I unholster my gun and hold it in my lap. He gets off at my exit, I don't. As he takes the exit, he forms a finger gun and points it at me. I file a police report. I am told to avoid that stretch of highway if possible. I do my grocery shopping at different stores for the next few months.
It is my eighteenth month of living in Baltimore. I still have not found a good pizza place. This has gone from annoying, to infuriating, to depressing. I have tried every recommendation on the subreddit, and half a dozen others besides. This city seems to thrive on pizzas that consist of doughy crust, no sauce, and plastic-y cheese. The best slice I have had in this city so far came from Costco. I joke about this with my friends.
It is my twentieth month of living in Baltimore. I have started working at a different courthouse. This one seems like it's in a slightly better neighborhood. At the very least, there are no obviously deserted and collapsing houses near it. When I tell my supervisor this he laughs, and tells me to make sure I leave before dark.
It is still my twentieth month of living in Baltimore. There has been a shooting near my workplace. I am unaware of this until I try to drive home, and have to detour around police tape cordoning off an intersection. I check the news when I get home. A one paragraph blurb informs me that one man was killed, and another wounded. The dead man appears to have been an innocent bystander. I realize I am more annoyed by the detour than the loss of life, and I am revolted by my own callousness.
It is my twenty-first month of living in Baltimore. It has rained all day, and when it's time for me to leave from work, the road home is flooded out. This road has flooded every time it rains heavily for at least the last ten years, according to my coworkers. No effort has been made to solve the issue. I detour to the next road. This detour takes half an hour. It too is flooded out. My twenty minute drive home takes two hours.
It is my twenty-second month of living in Baltimore. There has been an accident blocking the road on my drive home from work. A driver in a sedan ran a red light, and slammed into an SUV. The SUV has flipped onto its roof. The rear doors are open, and I can see an infant's car seat in the back. The intersection is clear enough for me to drive past. I take a look at the tags on the sedan, already knowing what I'm going to see. Sure enough, temp tags. I'm sure they're fake. For a moment I wonder about the fate of the SUV's occupants. I don't look it up when I get home. I don't want to know.
It is my twenty-fourth month of living in Baltimore. It is my last day working at the courthouse before classes begin again. There was a shooting at the same intersection as before. This time it took place early enough in the day that the police tape is down by the time I drive home, and I am grateful for the fact I won't have to take a detour getting home.
It is my twenty-fifth month of living in Baltimore. Disgusted with this city, the banality of its corruption, the constant grind of low-level crimes that the police just don't seem to give a fuck about, the seemingly monthly shooting close enough for me to hear it, the roving gangs of dirt bike youths who will occasionally smash the mirrors of cars they pass, the need to constantly wave off "squeegee kids" (ten to eighteen year olds who skip school to make a buck washing windshields at intersections throughout the city), the constant pervasive odor of weed, the open air drug deals I see every day, the crackheads and junkies I see every time I step outside my building asking for a dollar or a cigarette, the chicken bones that litter every sidewalk, I begin to write up this post.
When I first began to write I thought I would include anecdotes from other people I knew, if I felt myself running low on stories. I did not. Everything I wrote about in this thread, is something I experienced personally.
There's nothing new about what I've written here. Nothing you haven't heard of before. I'm not even completely sure this belongs in the culture war thread. I just hate this city. I hate what it does to people. I hate the callousness it has successfully infected me with. I hate the fact that I still have not found a decent fucking pizza place. I have received a job offer in a republican-run city in a blood-red state, and while I don't know if I'll be moving there, I will certainly be moving away from here.
Okay, I’ll be the one to bite the bullet and speak plainly. Baltimore is a majority-black city, has been for decades now. In that link I cited above (from the Baltimore City Planner’s Office, no less), the announcement states that the city “is growing browner” and has not only a declining population from 2010 to 2020, but also a declining white population, from 32% in 2000 to 28% in 2020.
You made a very good write-up and I enjoyed reading it. However, curiously absent from your discussion was the topic of race. You didn’t mention the races of anyone in your write-up. Certainly Baltimore’s majority-minority demographics are a unique trait for this city compared to most places in the United States. Do you think that the city’s multi-racial aspect has anything to do with its problems? As you describe things, Baltimore seems like a very low-trust, corrupt, impoverished “shithole”. Do you think that’s because of how many non-whites (and particularly the proportion of blacks and mixed-race people) there are who live there?
I'm fascinated by discussions of Baltimore or Gary, Indiana and other similar places on Reddit. It's usually a mixture of people describing their own terrible experiences (while studiously omitting the demographics of the perpetrators), economic explanations and occasionally cryptic comments alluding to the real cause that the mods haven't spotted. This is an example.
I can't remember where I read it, but I saw a blog post once that showed you could predict 80% of a US city's crime rate by measuring its African American population.
Back when I was a Fresh-off-the-boat immigrant, I did a 'crime detection' machine learning project. The unique part was that I mixed race with wider demographics (census info) & proximity to institutions (schools, banks,etc.).
I don't want to share the full report for anonymity reasons, but old naive me found a bunch of interesting statistical co-relations.
My favorite insight: Race does not help predict crime.
I am being half truthful ofc. The more accurate takeaway is : "Race is not needed when predicting crime, as long as you have other spicy features."
The spiciest - 'Female household with no husband'. It was by far the most predictive demographic feature for crime. The black crime problem is a fatherlessness problem. Not too surprising for the the average mottezian. But for a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant, I genuinely could not make sense of this finding. Nice to see my 8 year old study corroborate my 2024 intuition.
The more boring, but no less important feature was - 'Participation in labor force'. Nothing surprising here. Less jobs = More crime. More crime = Less jobs.
Second spiciest - Race can be completely discarded if you're accounting for local geography. Yes, black people commit more crime. But they seem to commit all their crimes in specific places. Crime occurs near nightclubs and schools. High density places have more crime, yes, but it is trivial to triage the hotspots down to the specific block. As much as random inspections in certain neighborhoods is a liberal meme, hot spot based inspections are objectively less racist.
Takeaways:
Joblessness and fatherlessness problems are the main cultural problems contributing to crime. You don't need an average IQ workforce to do well on either. Both are endemic in urban black communities. But, pair a bunch of Appalachian whites with these 2 problems and crime will still go up.
Crime is a hyper-local phenomenon. Crime can be largely addressed through stringent policing of the hotspots. My guess is that crime-as-a-lifestyle, like any social phenomenon is memetic and relies on social contagion. Dispersed criminals might find other spots to base their operations out of, but it is hard to scale if hotspots are stamped out. It also means that police don't need proportionally higher resources to curb crime. Most of the city can do just fine with the amount of policing it has.
Very interesting stuff.
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Slight disagree on race not being a visible indicator. Its all about your immediate environ, and I can't tell whether someone was raised fatherless, but I can tell when someone doesn't belong, and race is the fastest and most statistically significant shorthand I had. A shit neighborhood with crime infesting it often is blacker, true, but in public desegregated spaces I found laying attention to isolated or 4+ groups of blacks to be optimal for barm minimization. It is precisely because black criminals are outside their local geographic bound that the racial element comes to the fore I will never go anywhere near Crown Heights of my own volition, so the black criminals there are a distant problem. Seeing a group of 4 black kids strut into the C train at Chambers is anomalous enough to immediately set off spidey senses. If they had a boombox it was Showtime, who were irritating for other reasons.
Crime stands out precisely because it is anomalous: MonkeyWithAMachinegun treats the miasma of everpresent crime as background noise to the city, and living in Bed-Dtuy made me think incidental misery was just par for the course. An extended period of crashing at a friends place in fucking Alphabet City made me realize that crime was NOT an everpresent feature, it is localized to lazy thugs who can't be bothered to stray out of their neighbourhoods and thats what makes their anomalous presence such a visible precursor to crime.
In the end I ended up getting into trouble with white criminals more often, but I treat that as statistical provenance: I curated my social environment to be as white/asian as possible, so obviously any stupid shit I encountered will be due to them. The statistical frequency for which my encountering black people lead to negative experiences for me was a much higher rate than with whites, even controlling for geographic accidents. I may nkt have been Die Hard 4 John McClane, but wearing a nice suit and shoes at the bad side of Prospect Park might as well have put a quest icon screaming 'LOOT GOBLIN' to the neighbourhood.
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