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This is a good comment, and again illustrates the divide between those who have experienced clean, safe, decent public transportation, and those who have experienced the reverse.
I don't like to drive, and now have a 30 minute commute so that I can have a yard with children and chickens and fresh eggs, but previously relied on public transportation in several different cities. Busses in the Southwest were mostly civil, but I had to sit out in the brutal heat for up to an hour to get them. I eventually got a car when my plan became to take a bus in the morning to the first part of my job, then a ride from my family member at lunch, another ride from a co-worker or walk through an air force base, another walk back, then another bus ride, so I was spending probably three hours on this daily, and involving multiple different people with cars as well. This only worked for a month, and wouldn't have worked at all if I weren't single with no other obligations.
Chicago was interesting. For the most part, I actively enjoyed their public transportation. Even though there are some panhandlers and some smelly homeless, they're kept in line, and middle class businessmen still ride the trains. Also, the CTA was built in the brief window of knowing how to build impressive stacked roadways, elevated trains, underground garages with parks on top of them and so on, and before everyone decided not to do that, and that it was too much work. So the multi-level train rides were both civil and actually interesting in their own right. But there were certain stops I was warned away from (maybe this was unfounded prejudice -- I didn't test them to find out). My commute there also involved driving to the metra, walking between the metra and CTA line or a 40 minute walk, and took over an hour each way, but it was an hour I enjoyed, which made all the difference. Also, I didn't have any kids or really hobbies, and still needed the car anyway. If LA could become more like Chicago that might be worth doing, but it doesn't seem possible, the city simply isn't designed that way as far as I can tell.
The first relevant map I could find shows jumps in violent crime rate of as much as 5x between adjacent Chicago neighborhoods.
I've seen similar astonishingly sharp gradients in other cities... but I admit the idea of seeing a sharp gradient along a commuter train route is particularly shocking, and there seem to be a few of those here - Armour Square to Fuller Park?
The idea of "many criminals strike near home because they're too poor to have a car" always seemed a little bit odd to me, and they surely can't also be too poor to jump a turnstile, right? Is the real explanation a vicious/virtuous cycle of policing, where a criminal expects to be caught if preying on a "safe neighborhood", so they stay in the "unsafe neighborhood", which makes the job of the police on the "safe neighborhood" beat easier and makes them more likely to catch criminals who don't stay out?
Maybe there's some prosaic explanation, like "crime rates are normalized by residential population but people are being victimized in commercial areas that they commute to, so the numbers on that map have the wrong denominator".
This seems plausible. Among the South Side neighborhoods, there was the city worker neighborhood, where cops lived and were comfortable raising children and setting off (ostensibly illegal) fireworks on holidays, and repelled an attempted BLM protest. The cops were standing on the side of the street handing out recruitment fliers to people in their cars last I visited. And there are the other neighborhoods, where they're always investigating the last shooting, and there's barbed wire and metal detectors installed in the high schools. Presumably in the city worker neighborhood, if a person (especially a person who looked a certain way) were standing in a parking lot breaking into a car, someone would notice, call the cops, and those cops would come right away. In the other neighborhood they would not.
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There's some of that, but there's also a huge factor of "most criminals are lazy and stupid". You hear more about those who are less so, but robbing one's neighbors is just a lot easier than striking out across town and robbing someone there.
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