As January of 2016 comes to an end, it’s time to check in on “Death Race 2016” to see how things stand. As of today 9 people have died in car related crashes in Greater Springfield, none within the borders of the city itself despite the fact that the city has more streets and has the highest total vehicle miles traveled in the region. 8 of the victims were motorists themselves, 1 was a pedestrian, 6 were men, 3 were women.
From a media perspective the year began with 9 deaths in 9 days (one pedestrian death occurring on New Years’s Eve) and yet not a single news report from any of the 3 major regional news outlets (Masslive/Republican, WWLP, WesternMassNews) ever mentioned the particularly deadly beginning of the new year. Also, not a single death was given an ordinal number, as in “this was the #th roadway fatality of the year” and not a single article on any of the fatalities referenced any of the other fatalities. I will say that the crash on Route 20 in West Springfield did get mentioned when there was a non-fatal crash the next day on the same section of the roadway.
On the other hand, there was 1 murder in Springfield. While I realize statistics don’t work this way, it was curious that Springfield has averaged a murder every 25 days (I know that because the media saturates us with such statistics) over the last few years and the year’s first murder took place on the 25th. Every news source reported it as the first homicide of the year:
Reports are that the deceased was a victim of an ambush and that he was clearly the intended target of the shooting.
The purpose of the data here is to give a more complete picture of dangerousness as it relates to living typology. That is to say that people have said to me on many occasions that one reason they choose to not live in an urban neighborhood is due to concerns about safety. I have pointed out that published, peer reviewed papers have shown that “stranger danger” increases as you move further from a metro center. However, as none of those studies specifically targeted my own metropolitan area, I am doing the best I can to collect that data.
My hypothesis is this: Most of the danger which people associate with urban areas is actually behavior and relationship connected in a causal way, whereas the place related correlations are not causal. At the same time, living in an auto centered place is actually dangerous in and of itself due to the death and mayhem caused by automobiles moving at high speeds and on certain road types.
Some examples of this might be that a drug dealer could be shot on the same street corner as a drug dealer was shot two years ago, but his shooting was not caused by being on that street corner, but rather by dealing drugs. A person walking by that street corner and being shot accidentally as two drug dealers try to shoot one another would be a place related death as drug dealers are more likely to be on that street corner, apparently, than some other one. The same holds for domestic violence, if a man murders his ex girlfriend then the death is not place but relationship connected, but if a bullet from the abuser’s gun travels through a wall and kills an unintended victim, that would be place related.
On the auto end of the spectrum, people drive the way they do, at the speeds they do, and among the obstacles they do because of the place in which they are driving and therefore any death due to a crash would be place related. Even a drunk leaving a bar and wrapping a tree around a pole is place related because living within walking distance of the bar on a street where cars drive slowly diminishes the likelihood of car crash death substantially.
I appreciate the point you’re making. But a large fraction of car crashes are not place-related — an unsafe driver will drive unsafely in many types of surroundings. There’s some evidence for this in the fact that men are much more likely to die in car crashes than women.
While it’s true that less cautious drivers are more likely to die in a crash, those same drivers are much, much, much less likely to die on some roads than on others. I remember having a conversation at lunch one day: of the ten people around the table, three of us had grown up in walkable, basically urban places, and seven had grown up in the suburbs or the country; the seven who’d grown up outside the city could reel off a few names each of kids who’d died in car crashes back in high school; those of us from more urban places couldn’t come up with a single name. That’s likely partly because we drove less (though we did drive often, and often stupidly), and partly because the streets we drove on we’re much less conducive to driving fast and dangerously. It’s definitely not because we were any less dumb when we were teens. 😉
I know you are focusing on deaths, as it is obviously the worst possible outcome for the victim of either a car crash or a (successful) homicide attempt.
Nonetheless, how can issues related to the spill-over effects of other crimes be dealt with? In other words, if most homicides are person/behavior-related, does the same apply for all other crimes where such “high-risk” people adopting high-risk behavior live?
Maybe Springfield has a different dynamic, but in many cities, a concentration of “people much more likely to be murdered” has some detrimental secondary effects that are not as tied to them as murder, such as property crime, break-ins, muggings, pick-pocketing, vandalism in general (including gang-feud graffiti), and other sorts of varying danger level that still detract from some expected normalcy.
Now some people argue that being mugged, robbed at gun/knifepoint without further violence, having your car broken into are not really “serious” issues because you “only” lose some minor property (pocket money? a tablet? bags with clothes left on the back seat? a bicycle?) and is not harmed. This is the preferred discourse of the “tough it up, it is the city, be street-smart or leave” types (the ones who often resent gentrification in Manhattan or Downtown Los Angeles). Yet, I don’t think that is a very healthy proposition, nor one most middle-class adults or families would think of.
Humans are highly adaptable to stressful environments, with often untold mental health costs. Even people in deadly war zones often go unimaginable lengths to keep some normalcy to their lives.
In the case of semi-rough (but not South Chicago-rough) downtown areas, the risks of getting murdered accidentally are probabilistic low as you describe, if you are not involved with drugs, gangs or violent romantic partners. But what about the implied behavioral modifications required to deal with lesser forms of violence, such as the need to reinforce house security, the existence of some no-go blocks for children, or the heightened vigilance state required when walking late at night? Are these non-issues in Springfield?
I’m by no means making a false equivalency between getting your house wall tagged or your iPad snatched away with getting shot, just questioning the fact that places casually related to shootings and murders (because of people living there, not because of the typology or urban form) could well experience a spill-over of other antisocial criminal behavior that is less person-specific than murder or serious bodily assault.
I have written on those topics in other posts. I focus on death because incidents involving death are more reliably reported. What the data shows is that for every automobile death there are many times that number in serious injuries, much moreso than urban violence. Again, the point isn’t :It doesn’t matter to me if my neighbor gets shot” it is that, most of the time, when people calculate safety and dangerousness in selecting a place to live they often overlook how much more proximity to fast moving cars will increase danger than living amongst the poor. Ideally, we’d live in a walkable place with no crime! Thank you for commenting!
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