Bronycon PSA: Crime map of inner harbor · 8:23am Jun 10th, 2016
(Cross-posted to Convention Planning: Bronycon 2016)
When attending a convention in Baltimore, it's important to be aware that Baltimore is different from other American cities in one important way: The tourist district (the inner harbor) borders the museum / financial / university / high-crime district.
When attending a convention in Baltimore, it's important to be aware that Baltimore is different from other American cities in one important way: The tourist district (the inner harbor) borders the museum / financial / university / high-crime district.
The tourist district in Baltimore is a new thing, created artificially in the 1970s by bulldozing everything around the harbor and rebuilding the whole area. This small, circular target zone of rich people and tourists, transplanted into the middle of about a hundred thousand poor people, turned out to be too much temptation for some of them to resist.
The area right around the inner harbor is pretty safe. If you go three blocks north of the convention center, or three blocks west, it is not as safe.
Three blocks north of the convention center is Baltimore Street, and the part of it north of the harbor is known as "The Block", which is Baltimore's red-light district, though now it's hemmed in by banks, yuppies, and a giant police station. It has strip clubs where the women aren't good looking and you don't go there to watch them strip. One block north of that is Fayette street, where you'd buy crack, though usually about a mile further west.
The old peep shows and street markets have been overwritten in an apparently random pattern by universities, expensive new offices, and franchises targeted at upper-middle-class consumers. Walking around the area north of the convention center, you'll encounter jarring transitions in socioeconomic climate.
There are a lot of popular tourist spots in and on the other side of the high-crime area, including Edgar Allan Poe's grave, the Walters art gallery, the Baltimore basilica, the shot tower, and a lot of theaters. Little of this area looks dangerous. Not like the silent, post-apocalyptic streets of Sandtown, or the mad urban planner's barracks-like housing around Johns Hopkins Hospital. Most of it looks pretty nice. Yet it has similar violent crime statistics.
We are still talking about a very low probability of you personally having trouble during the convention, but with thousands of people, the odds of one person having trouble during three days is not negligible. The Walters is worth taking a risk for. The food in downtown Baltimore is not. My advice is, if you don't know the area, and there isn't some special place you want to go, either travel in groups, or stick to the safe places and save your food tourism for San Francisco, or New Orleans, or Manhattan.
The safest places are:
- The harbor itself, including the piers
- Two blocks north of the harbor
- West to Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, though there's no reason to go past the baseball and football stadiums
- South as far as you want
- Little Italy
- Fells Point
- anywhere in sight of the water
Below is a crime map showing murders, rapes, aggravated assaults, robberies, and robberies at gunpoint around the Inner Harbor in June thru August 2015. This does not include purse-snatchings and other non-violent thefts; the map would be illegible if I'd included them. Points to note:
- Crimes are recorded by address. Parks appear totally safe only because they have no addresses in them.
- Some places on this map show no crimes because they fall outside of the recording districts. I couldn't get a crime map of the whole area; I made this by piecing together crime maps for 4 police districts in GIMP.
- Other places show few crimes because the people there don't report most crimes. Sandtown is a very high crime area, yet shows on the crime map as a low-crime area.
- The dangerousness of a place is the number of marks on this map divided by the number of people who go there. Pratt Street has a number of robberies and assaults on it, but remember that many more people go down Pratt Street than the other streets. The whole downtown area looks more dangerous on a crime map than it is because there are more people there than in other places. The Perkins Homes housing project, just east of Little Italy and north of Fells Point, is the most-dangerous place; it has nearly as many robberies as the downtown area even though few people walk around there.
- The dataset for these 4 districts has 22 murders, 7 rapes, 410 muggings, and 412 assaults.
- That's only 9 violent crimes per day in those 4 police districts, so don't get too paranoid.
- If you take the light rail north of Pratt Street at night, you'll often be the only person in your railcar. I don't recommend it.
- There's a free bus service to most of the tourist destinations, the Charm City Circulator. You may want to print their maps out before arriving in Baltimore.
The convention center is outlined in red. I highlighted Little Italy in green and Fells Point in purple.
This is remarkably important info, and probably should be reposted when the convention actually starts.
Funny thing about Edgar Allen Poe's grave, they apparently moved it. Or at least heavily renovated the church yard in recent years. Apparently back in the, 80's I think, it was in a spooky little graveyard with a spooky looking old church right in the middle of the city. At least according to someone who visited it with John Waters at the time.
Huh, interesting. I feel liked this is information that would have been useful last year too, though since I didn't wander outside of the immediate harbor area myself I suppose there would have been no differences in behavior based on it.
*reads that the area around is dangerous*
*reads that, usually, there are 9 violent incidents per day*
*have a laugh crisis so hard that a lung explode*
Mate, 9 violent crimes in a day !? I live in Brasil...if anyplace in any city had only 9 violent crimes a day, the responsible for that city would be awarded a national hero medal for being so eficient in reducing the criminality of that city !!!! Gosh, that are some BLOCKS that have more then 9 crimes a day here !!!!
We got lost getting out of B-Mo the last time I was there and ended up heading west down Baltimore Street. :D Surprising how stark the distinction is. Also, we didn't get raped or killed, so yeah, don't get too paranoid. :B
4012636
You only think you didn't get raped or killed.
4012596 According to Wikipedia, of the 50 cities in the world with the highest murder rates, 21 are in Brazil.
The 9 per day figure is just violent attacks in roughly the region on the map. It doesn't count theft or burglary.
Crime rates depend on the reporting methodology. Baltimore has a very high reported street larceny rate, higher than the violent crime rate, which is strange, because street larceny means somebody going up to you on the street and taking your stuff without threatening you or using force. Downtown Seattle has a much higher violent crime reporting rate than Baltimore, but a much lower rate of mugging. I found this so curious that I began reading the crime reports. It turns out most of Seattle's violent crimes are "misdemeanor assaults", a category that isn't even recorded in Baltimore, and includes homeless people shouting at tourists.
4012728
cdn.pastemagazine.com/www/articles/shyamalan%20main.jpg
This is obvious, but if you're going to do any traveling, do so during the day and not at night.
Also, be prepared to have someone come up to you asking for money, even right outside the convention center. Lots of people hang around there due to the large crowds.
If you're feeling charitable you can give money, if you want. If you're uncomfortable however, just say "Sorry, all I have is a credit card." In my estimation it's a more believable excuse than saying you have no money at all.
Thanks lots for the info, BH. It's super helpful.
4012740 Since you brought up the reporting methodology, lemme tell a funny story.
Police Stations in Rio de Janeiro (one of the main cities of Brasil, and the main place for the future olympics events) must fill up reports uppon crimes in general, in order to show how efficient they are fighting crime.
It was (maybe still is ?) procedure to drag a corpse found within the area of a determined police station towards the area of ANOTHER police station, in order to make the first one look more safe, since the corpse wasn´t found within its area.
And, then, the other police station staff did the same, dragging the corpse back.
And so on...´till someone sees it and they had to let the corpse where it was.
Funny...so funny...it´s like tug of war with corpses. Should be a sport !
4012596
The US is a very safe country. This is why Americans get warned about crime when they go to Europe - as far as most Americans observe, Europe is more dangerous than the US. This is despite the fact that the US has a significantly higher homicide rate than Europe, and otherwise comparable-to-high crime rates (though it depends on the country - the UK has a TON more aggravated assaults/"woundings" as they call them than the US does on a per-capita basis).
The reason is that most of us don't live in high crime areas, and the high-crime areas have crime rates vastly in excess of what is normal. Normally, people never go into high-crime areas, because there is nothing of value there. Ergo, pretty much everyone who gets victimized there is a local, or is visiting a local.
The crime rate in American cities can vary by as much as two orders of magnitude, and depending on where you are in the city, it can vary by as much.
4012740
To be fair, one of the problems with stats like that is that it by necessity requires that the place have enough law there to actually record the crimes.
For instance, all of the most dangerous cities in Africa according to that list are in South Africa. The most likely cause of this is not "South Africa is the most dangerous country in Africa" but "South Africa actually has a stable, competent government which can actually reliably record crime statistics".
4015278
It is the difference between an average and a median.
Chandler, Arizona has a murder and non-negligent homicide (combined) rate of 0.4 per 100k.
St. Louis, Missouri has a murder and non-negligent homicide (combined) rate of 49.9 per 100k.
The former is comparable to the countries with the lowest homicide rates in the world.
The latter is comparable to the countries with the highest homicide rates in the world.
Even on a state-by-state basis, New Hampshire had a homicide rate of 0.9 per 100k in 2014, compared to 10.3 for Louisiana - a full order of magnitude difference.
But there's another layer as well. Take the City of Chicago. Homicide rate of 15.1 per 100k. That's quite high.
But you are 98.5% less likely on a per-capita basis to be shot in that city if you are white than if you are black. Why? Because almost all of the homicide is inner city violence.
White Americans experience a homicide rate about an order of magnitude lower than black Americans. Black Americans make up only 13% of the population, but account for 50% of the homicides - both criminal and victim.
If you're a poor black person, you're likely to be victimized by other poor black people by simple proximity.
But other people don't spend time around poor black people, and consequently, are much less likely to be victimized by them.
Most Americans experience low or very low crime rates. A small fraction of Americans experience very high crime rates. Averaging them out will lead you to the misleading idea that most Americans experience moderate crime rates, but in reality, the distribution is very uneven.
Wait. I was holed up ten blocks north from the convention centre. The transition to high crime is three blocks. So... I was in a hotel in the kill zone?!
Hmm... I should've been more scared but strangely I find it a bit exhilarating. Like, I totally didn't get murder raped. Woo hoo! Plus I kinda really liked the hotel, despite how cheap and jank it was.
Aside from the high crime area this sounds exactly like downtown Toronto. (Jane and Finch is thankfully far from the core)