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"No-go zones" are areas where the police are reluctant to enter because of the danger. "Wait!" you say. "Didn't the news tell me that 'no-go zones' are a myth?" Ask Reuters <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-security-police/fr...> about those supposedly nonexistent no-go zones. Or The Independent <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/paris-terror-...>: >Brice De Ruyver, who spent eight years as security adviser to then-Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, said Molenbeek suffers from a cocktail of problems. “Youths are poorly educated, attracted by petty crime, have run-ins with police, and then there is a vicious circle, which leads to recruitment by radical groups,” he said, adding that the problems are now so serious, that it is hard to find police willing to bother tackling them. >“We don’t officially have no-go zones in Brussels, but in reality, there are, and they are in Molenbeek.” The Los Angeles Times disagreed with the harsh description <http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-paris-attack-molen...> of Molenbeek, but the funny thing is it did so only by favorably compararing it with the French banlieus! That well-known right-wing rag The New Republic agreed <https://newrepublic.com/article/120714/charlie-hebdo-attack-...> regarding the banlieus,, as did The New Yorker <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/the-other-franc...>. (I highly recommend the last, by the way.) The US has the likes of Detroit, Chicago ("Chiraq"), etc., and we're discussing San Francisco now. In none of those places, however—not during the worst of the "Fort Apache" years in the South Bronx in the 1970s, or South Central during the crack epidemic in the 1980s—did the police refuse to enter them, and thankfully they are all better than they used to be. That doesn't mean that these European neighborhoods are worse than the South Bronx c. 1975, but it does mean that the police in those places have overtly or implicitly made a decision regarding them and their own safety. |