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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23560 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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People do often seem to say that crime is pretty high in New Mexico, though, especially around the large towns and cities (and especially around Albuquerque). Are you very rural?

Crime varies a lot from place to place even within Albuquerque. It is relatively bad as a whole, but apparently these days it's not as bad as Gallup (which doesn't surprise me) or Santa Fe (which does). Check out the interactive map here, bearing in mind that lower-population-area results are pretty noisy.

The neighborhood where I grew up gets an "F" today, though StreetView says the only neighbor with bars on their windows is the one who installed them after a break-in decades ago. The worst areas are around the airport, probably because anybody who could afford to live somewhere with less airplane noise did and then the selection effects snowballed from there. There are some high speed roads to get through those areas to the national labs where all the PhDs work, but I know one ex-Albuquerque scientist who left the state after his wife got carjacked, so "just drive past the crime" isn't a foolproof option.

I still have family there, at least in the better areas of town. I don't worry too much about them being victimized and I'd bet @Gaashk will be fine too. Albuquerque's homicide rate is atrocious but it's still better than around 3 dozen other large US cities, the ones you'd expect but also a bunch you wouldn't think twice about unless/until the Eye Of Vince Gilligan turns its pitiless gaze their way.

These charts comparing cities in the Southwest are the ones that stuck in my mind. 2023-24 data, so things might have changed since then, but ABQ is pretty bad. I'd note, though, that the comparison doesn't include Bakersfield, which ABQ recently surpassed for most car thefts per capita and is by all accounts a dreadful place.

Edit: and I'll have to look on a computer later, but everything I'm finding on a quick phone search is saying ABQ still has almost double the crime rates of SF.

I wonder how much that is influenced by locality / microenvironmental factors that aren't shown in the statistics. Eg. Finland used to have a fairly high homicide rate (compared to peer countries) while actually being a very safe place to live as long as you weren't a middle aged unemployed alcoholic male drinking with your buddies.

It's not completely random that Breaking Bad took place there, I will be very concerned and possibly move if my kids seem interested in drugs.

And funnily enough, it was originally supposed to take place in Bakersfield, but switched to ABQ due to New Mexico tax incentives.

There's a lot of variance from year to year, especially since Covid (Wiki's list is mostly 2021 data, in which Las Vegas "beat" Albuquerque by a couple homicides-per-100k, but both rates have dropped drastically since), but the Southwest is pretty free from the worst violence hotspots on the whole. After Vegas and Albuquerque the worst time-averaged homicide rate might be Denver, and it's way down the list for cities of its size.

ABQ still has almost double the crime rates of SF.

I wouldn't be surprised. SF has had some really high-profile but limited problems (We stopped bothering to prosecute car break-ins and for some inexplicable reason there was a long rash of car break-ins! After we figured out that crime is just caused by poverty, did anyone remember to tell the criminals?) but even bad enforcement has to do a lot of work to cancel out a selection effect as strong as "being able to afford to live in SF".

Yeah, I've heard that. I've heard it about parts of Chicago as well, and in both places, I don't drive with the windows down or leave my car for large stretches of time or walk alone, and so on.

Accidental double post

I've heard it about parts of Chicago as well

Chicago was strongly affected by red-lining. Anecdotally, most of the non-petty crime is strictly limited to the south and west sides of the city. There is very little chance you will just "wander" into the bad neighborhoods unless you are completely oblivious, deliberately or otherwise, to the changing neighborhood affluence markers. It's literally a gradient from good -> bad. The only real exception to this rule is the area around Hyde Park, which is the purview of the University of Chicago. It's smack dab deep in the ghetto, the metra stop for Hyde Park is very rough, but the actual neighborhood itself is super nice, until you cross the street boundary.

I was living on the South Side, and kept going to places like the DMV, or the grocery store, or some cool little fried shrimp place on a bridge, or a nature preserve, and my father in law kept giving me startling strong opinions about the places I had to drive through to get to them.

I lived on the outmost west side of the "good" parts of the city, in avondale/logan square. It was fine. The neighbor had a bit of "character" about it, but was more rough working class rather than actually ghetto. The worst thing that ever happened was a drive by shooting 3-4 blocks south of my apartment. Unfortunately, as is generally the case, a bystander was caught in the crossfire.

One of my swim coaches was stabbed to death in West Mesa. For some reason, despite being a not great neighborhood, West Mesa also had the best pool complex in Albuquerque.

Worst that happened to my family directly I think was a tandem bike getting stolen.

I think the real trouble is in most cities the crime is segregated by neighborhood much more clearly than in Albuquerque, where you can have really great and well-kept infrastructure in an area of town who's name gets Google Autocompleted to "West Mesa Murders."

I'm sorry to hear that! There are occasionally people murdering each other in my area (village/exurb), but only if they get involved in some kind of family feud, or possibly drugs. Drugs are bad in general, but the entire Southwest has bad cartel activity and car thieves.

And alien abductions, of course. But you know maybe people are into that.

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