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In CT’s cities, crime is growth business

I’ve been enlightening you for years now — and all I’ve ever asked in return is the usual end-of-year gratuity.

You still owe me that. But what I need right now is for a bunch of you to take me down to New Haven, so we can walk around and see art movies and go to the theater and eat at cool restaurants and watch naked Ivy League poets recite sonnets on street corners.

I really like New Haven, but I’ve been scared to death to go there, ever since the website 24/7 Wall St. declared New Haven the fourth most dangerous city in the nation. I do love my New Haven pizza, but I’m not willing to risk my life for it. I figure that if a bunch of us go down there as a squadron of sorts, we can make it through closing hour at the bars without falling victim to marauding bad guys.

In response to being labeled really scary, New Haven officials and other powers-that-be didn’t call out the National Guard or impose a curfew or begin strict enforcement of parking meter violations. No, everyone from the mayor to FBI mathematical terrorism enforcement staffers quarreled a bit with the methodology, which is a lot easier than catching bad guys.

Of course, if you live by the murky methodology, you die by the murky methodology. New Haven normally wins “best pizza this side of Italy” surveys all the time, based on analysis more soggy than a thin-crust pizza with too much tomato sauce.

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As is often the case with “best of” and ‘worst of” and “most dangerous” kinds of analysis, this danger-survey is based in a number of variables, ranging from the FBI crime statistics to unemployment levels to how many Yale students are out at night, on the theory that many of them will grow up to be investment bankers and who could be more dangerous than that?

The timing of the survey didn’t do New Haven any favors; the city had just gone through one of those Welcome to Dodge City periods during which eight people had been shot in two days.

Only one of those eight people died, which points out one of the oddities of crime statistics. If the bad guys’ aim had been a little better, or if the doctors had been a little less clever, New Haven could have had corpses strewn about town and been labeled, “Murder Capital of the World.”

A mix of reality, common sense, perception, racism and those pesky crime statistics makes almost any urban center a more stressful place to live and play and work than rural South Dakota. One of the great unspoken elements of the debate about whether to relocate New Haven’s prestigious Long Wharf Theater from its unlovely commercial site just off I-91 to the bright lights of downtown was the reality that many suburbanites preferred the on-and-off approach to setting a tentative toe in the heart of the city.

Whether it be church-led marches and rallies against crime (a popular and unsuccessful strategy in such places as Hartford and Boston) or adding more “cops on the street,” or calling in the state cops to find an excuse to arrest every insolent young man who just might be carrying a gun or a bag of drugs, the cities and densely populated ring suburbs are never going to be Heaven on Earth, when it comes to safety.

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As of this writing, Hartford has had 17 homicides already this year — an increase over last year. Congratulations are not in order.

 

Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.

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