“Murderapolis” is The Culture of Terror, and Statistics Can Both Illuminate and Mislead
“Crime in Whittier” is a popular and powerful theme.Like the OJ Simpson news story, it has “legs,” meaning it holds enough interest that it is able to stick around long enough to develop multiple storylines, each being honed and expanded by those who “speak” and hear them.c
In Whittier, fear of crime is generated by talk of such things as “thugs,” homeless shelters, soup kitchens, prostitutes, and supportive housing for the mentally ill and/or drug addicted. If the general statistics and particular details of crimes in Whittier that I provided earlier were about the immediate victims of crime, this section is about the indirect experience with crime that all Whittier-ites have. While the statistics show that each individual is very rarely, if ever, a victim (as defined by police reports), all of us live with a general fear of crime. In this sense, while crime itself is dispersed and infrequent, the effect of crime is ubiquitous and ambient. ci
While statistics can expose how non-dangerous ghettos actually are, they speak nothing about the huge toll that a few acts of violence can have on a whole community. People are heavily affected by the crime that may be occurring around them. After
Bourgois explained that one’s danger of crime in El Barrio is “objectively” low, he added however that “street culture’s violence pervades daily life” (34). While happening
infrequently on the street, crime and violence seemed to have a large effect upon how the rest of the residents acted. The “peaceful majority” of El Barrio silenced themselves and were scared into a sort of submission; most did little to stop the crime. Raw criminal statistics can both illuminate and neglect.
Bourgois theorizes that in ghettos such as El Barrio, there is so much talk about violence and crime, that this discourse creates the perception that violence is imminent for anyone daring to set foot within it (Bourgois 1995:34). This talk not only bullies the residents of ghettos such as El Barrio and victimizes them even more, but it leads those in the mainstream of society to perceive ghettos as nothing but very dangerous places. He refers to this fear and the debilitating effect it has on the community as a “culture of terror.” cii
To be clear, the culture of terror in El Barrio does not imply the neighborhood is dangerous, but simply that there is lots of talk about it being dangerous. Terror is not necessarily physical violence itself, but a feeling about violence. Discourse produces the terror that people feel. Whittier, New York City subways, and El Barrio are not
dangerous, but constructing them as such has very real and negative implications for those populating those places.
In the middle of Minneapolis’ worst ever year for murders, 1995, one reporter did try to contextualize what it meant to be in “Murderapolis” (von Sternberg, Star Tribune 1995).
The city's 51 homicides in six months have been jarring and unprecedented … it would be a mistake to see them as a citywide epidemic. An analysis of the homicide statistics shows that the first half of 1995 was deadly in only a few of the city's neighborhoods and among only a few demographic slices of its
population. The numbers show that most Minneapolis residents remain relatively safe from becoming homicide victims. "Random violence has a lot of people thinking that they're dead if they even go near the city," said … assistant director of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs. "Even though the random cases are a small part of things, that's what sticks in people's heads.”
This section of this article provides a sober perspective.ciii However, like scary anecdotes, the micro-geographical perspective can also be used to erroneously paint a single street or a few block radius as unlivable.
Plotting the homicides on a city map shows they were concentrated in a few neighborhoods on the north and south sides. "The reality is, if you don't drive West Broadway, Plymouth, Franklin or central Lake St. [Whittier], you're not going to see much that's all that terrifying," said the director of the Urban Studies Department at the University of Minnesota. "Those and a few other parts of the city are changing very dramatically. I had students walk every block of the city 15
years ago for a historic-preservation project. I wouldn't do that now because some areas just aren't safe."
Actually, the reality is that you could spend a lifetime driving West Broadway and never see anything terrifying. I have been driving three of the boulevards mentioned above for over a decade and never, ever, seen anything scary on any of them. The worst thing I see are cars pulled over by squads (however, my wife was very spooked one day at Franklin and Nicollet near our home while driving with our kids, when she saw unmarked cop cars screech to a halt on the sidewalk, and plain-clothes cops jump out, guns drawn, in order to apprehend a fugitive). However, everyone who read the article above, or talked about it to their friends, might now be frightened of all those streets mentioned in the article.
Like me, the Star Tribune journalist calculated statistics on the chances of being a murder victim in Whittier, but unlike me, he did not seem aware that comparing the number of victims with neighborhood population is a meaningless statistic, since many if not most all the victims will be from outside the neighborhood (von Sternberg).
No murders occurred in the first six months of 1995 in the census tracts where about three-quarters of Minneapolis residents live. In 28 tracts, where one
homicide occurred, the likelihood of becoming a homicide victim was between 1 in 2,100 and 1 in 3,800 in the first six months. But in the 11 census tracts where more than one homicide occurred, the likelihood jumps to as much as 1 in 600. A 24-block swath of the Whittier neighborhood is one such area. Three of the city's homicides this year happened in the area bound by Nicollet and Aldrich Aves. S., and W. 25th and 28th St. The chance that one of the 3,900 residents living in that census tract would be killed during the first six months of the year was 1 in 700. That their neighborhood can be a lethal place comes as no surprise to residents. Some say it has worsened in recent years; others say that it hasn't and that it's a citywide affliction.civ
And while it seems that in Whittier most of the victims did in fact live here, in the most recent murder both the victim and suspect were from the northern suburbs, even though the man was shot a block from my home. He was killed because the man driving the car he was in, made the risky decision to step on the gas and flee when a man with a gun attempted to steal the car.
The Star Tribune reporter’s odds make little sense since most of the people murdered in America are either perpetrating a crime at the time of death, or making a