[ModernMech]

> This is an extremely unlikely story.

I'm glad you love your city and all, but whether or not you find my story unlikely you're not really denying the thrust of it. That the issue is a prominent feature on Wikipedia seems to bolster my argument and prove that it's a problem, I'm not sure why you brought that up as it doesn't help your position.

Anyway, as far as the story in question, it covers violent crimes as well as drug use, harassment, public sanitation issues, mental health, as well as just homelessness in general, not all of which are violent or crimes. Lumping all of this into "out of control violent crime" really throws the issue out of context.

It's also true that violent crime rates are an extremely reasonable measure of danger in a city, but in so far as we're talking about cities, they also show that violent crime does in fact concentrate there, and they also hide dangers which are not crimes or are not reported. For example, the crime of rape is committed at much higher rates than it's reported, so if we were to look at the stats of a place with a high rate of rape, we might conclude there is a low rate of rape based on low figures. So while they are reasonable they are not the full picture and can in fact be misleading.