My neighborhood, Bel-Air/Edison, as shown below, led all of Baltimore with 9 homicides last year. While it seems like it's mostly a function of how the neighborhoods are drawn (check out the tiny but dangerous Eastern District, which had 38 homicides last year but no "neighborhoods" that were amongst the top-6). Still, it's pretty scary. I never feel unsafe, and feel like my neighbors and I do a good job of keeping an eye out, but I have called the police a couple of times since moving in - mostly because people occasionally like to hang out in their cars behind my fence. (One time, I saw a couple smoking crack in a car. They were on the street but kind of using my private fence as a hiding place.)
Rising Tide: Baltimore's 2009 homicide toll goes against national trends by going up
AL Notes: Yankees, A's, Royals, White Sox, Mariners
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With the Dodgers and manager Don Mattingly at Yankee Stadium today, Yankees GM Brian Cashman discussed the process that resulted in Yanks' manager Joe Girard...
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I'd say the neighborhood ratings are not as scary as the fact that the Northeast District leads the city. Districts are chosen to be relatively equal in terms of policing required. Neighborhood boundaries are based on arbitrary lines and leave some tiny and some very large. I'd say Belair-Edison is one of the larger neighborhoods in the Northeast. Head north a bit and things don't get safer, they just get split into small neighborhoods. Then the neighborhood associations are totally worthless and about all the cohesiveness you've got is one or two blocks of people that you say hi to.
I alternate between thinking of moving west by a less than a mile and a sense that most of the danger is blocks away and mainly impacts people involved with the drug trade, at least peripherally.
I don't want to move. We've collected too much stuff over the last18 years or so. We've tuned our house to fit our needs, which are pretty complex. There's a yard backing up to a park that really is incredible. It's not a seller's market and there are 3 for sale signs within 100yds of our house.
On the other hand, the helicopters can get to be a bit much and I start to worry about standing on my back porch calling in the dog when they're circling. Traffic on our road is awful and the worst offenders are the cops zipping by to crime scenes. I'm sad that my kids will never know a neighborhood/play group feeling and that I can't let them do a lot of wandering around on their own like I did in my childhood.
Life is filled with hard choices and right now inertia is winning.
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