I can agree with that. :)>-
@JBStillFlying I’m not commenting on someone’s level of risk-aversion; rather, I’m noting that statistical evidence for the riskiness of the CTA is flimsy at best and nonexistent in fact. Again, a system that transports half a billion passengers a year saw 421 robberies last year (say the numbers) or slightly more when you adjust the numbers for other factors, and I’d bet good money that most of these incidents happened exactly as @CU123 describes. Robberies on the system are one-in-a-million, actual violence tied to a robbery is 3-4 times less frequent, and aggravated assaults are a one-in-50-million occurrence.
I’m not kidding when I say that students are as likely to be mugged walking through parts of Hyde Park and/or the UCPD’s patrol area (including the vicinity of the Metra) as they are on the CTA. I say this based on what I’ve heard at community policing meetings in my neck of HP/Woodlawn, straight from our beat officers. The safest choice of all is never leaving your bedroom, but the CTA and/or walking to the Metra are both close seconds. Driving/taking a ride share is next, and walking is almost as safe in most neighborhoods. All are extremely low-risk behaviors if you’re in Hyde Park or taking some form of motorized transport out of the neighborhood. Walking through Washington Park alone at night is risky, and I wouldn’t stroll through Englewood with my eyes fixed on a smartphone, but short of this most ways of getting from point A to point B - including the CTA - carry similar, low risks. If anything, getting off the street and onto a bus carries a negative expected loss.
The perception of areas like Hyde Park and/or the CTA as dangerous (except to the extent that getting out of your bed in the morning is a risk) stems largely from anecdote-based news reporting, overzealous use of security alerts (among students specifically), bad/sensationalist reporting about national and local crime trends, politicians with an electoral incentive to cast the city as a crime-riddled hellhole, and lots of “Chicagoans” who live in Evanston or Blue Island and experience the South Side through their windshields if at all.
This perception flies squarely in the face of the data and it drives me nuts.
Your impression is correct. By far the most common security alert reads something like this:
“At (late hour) on (weekday night), a University student walking along (some street near campus, usually on 54th/53rd) and was approached by two unknown suspects. One (implied a weapon/produced a weapon) and announced a robbery. The victim handed over (cash and/or their phone) and the suspects fled (on foot/in a white sedan) in an unknown direction. The Chicago Police Department is investigating the case.”
Expensive, but generally harmless. If they ever catch the group in the white sedan, I suspect these incidents will fall sharply overnight. Once in a while (maybe once or twice a month) someone resists and the perp strikes them before fleeing. At a 15,000-person university in a major city, this isn’t all that unexpected.
There have been a few spikes in burglaries over the last six months - often the perpetrators have hit multiple apartments in the same unit/block at once, but besides the steady trickle of students getting held up somewhere on 54th, by suspects who may or may not have a gun, very little of note happens in Hyde Park.
The most exciting thing I’ve heard about was when some fool reported a robbery at 57th and University - probably the safest corner in Hyde Park because it’s patrolled by the UCPD, usually busy, and near the heart of campus. His story featured this exchange:
Old lady in a white dress: “Do you have any money?”
Foolish student: “No.”
Old lady: produces a gun
“Do you have any now?”
Because this was not the kind of place where robberies should happen, the UCPD went to DEFCON 1. Then they reviewed security footage from the day in question (yes, this happened in broad daylight) and discovered the “victim” had made up the whole incident. The rest of campus proceeded to make this story the butt of jokes for the better part of a week.
A close second is the time a student reported harassment over over social media, apparently motivated by their political views, which the university took seriously enough to call the FBI. Then it turned out the student had concocted the whole incident (which involved “hacking” of their account) out of thin air to draw attention to their pet issue. The student was asked to some time off school after that. On the bright side, this wasn’t a complete waste of time; the incident inspired a plotline in Dear White People.
When the UCPD isn’t dealing with small-time stickup artists or students with too much time on their hands, they get lots of lost property and occasional reports of sexual assault. IMHO, the last of these is the most serious issue, and it’s generally the one that gets the fewest resources and the least attention from the UCPD.
An aside with regards to the Tribune editorial: South Shore’s problems are real, but the Tribune editorial board is by turns obtuse, sensationalist, and reflexively Chicago-skeptic. Since Tronc bought the paper, it’s largely parroted talking points from the paper’s higher-ups. I would trust any of the Tribune’s individual columnists over the full cabal.
Well, @DunBoyer - at #22 - the family who moved away from South Shore due to the shooting on their block is real. And the decrease in loop workers from South Shore is real. I wouldn’t attribute much - if any - of that to racist perceptions (the families emptying out of SS are, for the most part, AA).
Wouldn’t exactly call the suspects in the white sedan “harmless” if they implied or produced a gun. After all, if a fellow student did the same in class, would he/she be treated as “harmless”? Don’t think so. And if one is struck in the process of a holdup - well, I believe that’s called “aggravated assault”.
Obviously some level of crime is, unfortunately, to be expected given the very urban setting of UChicago, and a comparison of campus statistics (most current is 2015) don’t really show that the university is more “dangerous” than Harvard, Stanford, Yale, or Penn (on the issue of robbery and aggravated assault, UChicago is actually worse than Columbia). Campus stats don’t capture the most recent trends and continued violence on the south side in general is always going to be a matter of concern due to logistics. South Shore may rebound with a diverse mix of families which would be fantastic news. However, if it deteriorates - or continues its current trend of losing black middle/professional class residents - that would be a huge failure on the city. And not just because that could adversely impact safety in HP.
@DunBoyer at #21 - can’t disagree on the stats. Just saying that someone who’s been through a mugging doesn’t hold the monopoly on how it is supposed to affect you, and that there are rational reasons for people making the decisions they do. We’ve known plenty of students at UChicago who not only looked like muggings waiting to happen - they WOULD get mugged! (30 years ago . . . different time period). Statistics over a large group don’t necessarily translate to an individual’s profile for getting mugged. Also, there’s the reality that a 95 lb female might legitimately have more concerns for her safety than a 160 lb. male. That’s just common sense and has nothing to do with incorrect perceptions or anecdotes.
And incidentally, the South Side is actually a higher crime area than Evanston. Can’t speak for Blue Island. Sure, those families haven’t lived in nor paid much attention to the south side for generations now. And they may have warped perceptions about safety on the CTA or on the South Side. But there are PLENTY of other families who have moved back (or moved for the first time) to Chicago to raise their children - as long as the area is safe, the schools are decent, and the housing available. People will always try to move to where they believe they have a better quality of life. If families are, on net, moving OUT of the south side because they see a better quality of life elsewhere, that’s a sign of significant problems OTHER than racism, political opportunism, and sensationalist crime-reporting.
@ReqCollatz at #6: CTA’a area of operation is within the city, including the places you mention. Of the two, Metra is the one that exits the city and heads into far-flung areas.
The number 6 and number 2 buses are extremely safe.
I have been mugged once, ever. It was on the North Side in Lincoln Park. And I still walk there, as well as in Hyde Park.
@JBStillFlying Going back to your riposte to me at #13 (I have been sleeping while I see others have been pondering this matter) it is not my intention to make light of any particular person’s experience or any particular way that person may have been affected by such experience. We tend to deal in generalities on this board, so that caveat should usually be assumed but perhaps ought to have been stated explicitly. I would, however, go so far as to say that it is good advice in advance of the actual happening of any such event to take into consideration its relative remoteness in probability as well as the relative likelihood that its effects will not include physical harm. Keeping those probabilities in view will free the mind from needless anxieties and open it up to all the good things that accompany the risks of living an uninhibited life in a big city. I would further urge the same attitude after the happening a bad event, at least where no physical harm has been done. But - here cometh the caveat - these are things each individual has to find in his/her own character.
I believe you must be right in suggesting that the genders may differ in their concern about and response to these things. The reasons for this are obvious and not controversial. In my speculation about youth (or at least the kind who come to UChicago) actually embracing and being invigorated by a certain level of danger, I was extrapolating from an attitude of me and my male friends when we lived in the environs of the University in a more dangerous era. Young men, as Maclean’s title and book recount, are drawn to such dangers, perhaps as a matter of self-testing, perhaps from sheer testosterone-fueled foolishness. Probably some young women are like this as well but probably not so many. I can’t say. In any event this is hardly to suggest that Hyde Park as it is today - or today’s young U of C males - bear comparison with, say, young marines in a battle zone. The latter is, however, only a more extreme form of the insouciance young guys tend to bring to dangerous or quasi-dangerous situations. Maclean recounts this in measured terms about young smoke-jumpers, but one must turn to a great poet, William Butler Yeats, for the most extravagant statement of it: “Even the mildest man grows tense / With some sort of violence / Before he can accomplish fate, / Know his work or choose his mate.” This may be exquisitely silly or simply dangerous as moral teaching, but in a long ago day it gave me courage.
Robbery by definition includes the threat of force (and force, in the context of interaction with a stranger who is willing to commit a felony, pretty much always includes the risk of what most people would call “violence”; we’re not talking about a potential shoving match between 6-year-olds). The term “mugging” isn’t a legal term, but I think it’s usually used to mean the same thing as robbery.
The article I linked to does not distinguish between completed violence and a threat of violence. I think being the victim of battery could also caused PTSD, but that’s not what the linked article is about.
Here is what I specifically disagree with in DunBoyer’s posts:
“It costs $4.00 to take the Metra from Hyde Park to Millennium Station. You’re paying a premium of somewhere between $1.75 and $4.00 (the difference between summer fares and Metra fares, and unlimited U-Pass travel and Metra fares, respectively) to avoid a 1-in-3000 chance of a robbery. … Unless a student makes a habit of carrying somewhere between $5,250 (in the summer) and $12,000 (during the academic year) in cash and valuables on their person, the Metra is a really, really overpriced form of insurance against the distant possibility of a robbery and the virtually nonexistent chance of a more serious crime on the CTA.”
And then this: “[Description of a robbery in which there is no physical injury]. Expensive, but generally harmless.”
These statements make the assumption that the main damage from a robbery is the loss of money. As if a robbery is the same thing as losing the same amount of money at a casino. That’s absurd.
As to the CTA statistics, I haven’t checked into them. (Curious: Do you have access to statistics from around 1994 or 1995? Do they also show a one in a million risk of being the victim of a violent crime like robbery or battery on the CTA?)
It does seem like you’re saying that you’re just making up most of your guesses, though (doubles the total, multiplier of 5, etc.). Which I think is, if anything, less useful than anecdotal evidence of actual crimes.
I don’t know how you come up with an estimate of how many crimes are reported. It seems like you just made this 10% number up? Is that wildly pessimistic or wildly optimistic? I don’t know. Since most people have almost nothing to gain in a narrow concrete sense from reporting crime (if there’s enough money involved, maybe they can file an insurance report??), why would we assume that even 1 in 100 victims would report crime? I’m not saying this is the case, but without actual statistics, which would be hard to come by, it’s just making a number up, which again, seems to be less useful than just polling your friends about whether they know anyone who has been mugged or battered or whatever.
Here’s some more anecdotal info on how frequently people report being victims of crime, given that we apparently have no statistics regarding the crimes being discussed above: I have been the victim of 1 violent crime on the U of C campus, 1 violent crime in the Loop (L station at 11 a.m.), and 1 violent crime in Florence. I was slightly physically injured in both the Loop crime and the Florence crime. Of these, I reported only the U of C campus one (and only did that 20 minutes after it happened after a phone call with a friend convinced me that it was my duty to go through that unpleasant and stressful experience and time-consuming experience … and after all of that, the Chicago [city] police report classified that crime in a way that was lower than what it actually was too - not sure why, but I looked up the online crime statistics for that year recently and realized that even if they had reported it accurately, the online statistics wouldn’t have shown it).
And I am, if anything, the kind of person who is much more likely to report crime. In the Loop and Florence cases, it would have been extremely inconvenient for me to hang around for hours at the L station, a police station, or even my home, in order to be able to file a police report, when the only result would have been to (maybe) add one more number to the police statistics. So I just didn’t.
None of what I’m saying goes specifically to the calculus of whether to take buses, L, IC, or Uber, or to stand or walk around the U of C campus. I certain do not disagree with this: “I’m not kidding when I say that students are as likely to be mugged walking through parts of Hyde Park and/or the UCPD’s patrol area (including the vicinity of the Metra) as they are on the CTA.”
I rode the IC much more frequently than buses or the L, but I didn’t ride any of them very frequently. I also didn’t walk around by myself after dinner time on U of C campus much.
Hopefully both the L and the U of C campus are much, much safer now. The dismissive attitude that you and some others have about violent crimes such as robbery don’t allow your reassurances to be very reassuring, however.
I am not disagreeing that people react differently to mugging, battery, and other violent crimes or that everyone is seriously traumatized by being the victim of a robbery (or a battery or sexual assault). The point of the article I linked to is that threat of violence is often seriously traumatizing, even if there is no completed violence. And I guess it’s also saying that some people may not recognize their symptoms (?). But I absolutely agree that people are different. I was actually less (patently?) traumatized by all 3 of these violent crimes than I, knowing myself, would have predicted in advance. They did make me even more cautious than I’d been in the past, however, and they probably inform how I teach my kids to act.
You will always be able to say, “I’ve never been the victim of a violent crime” … until you’ve been the victim. When most people ask if a place is “safe”, they don’t mean “is there more than a 50/50 chance that I’ll be the victim of a violent crime.”
As to this - "The fact that there is a slight sense of danger in the air is in my mind part of the mystique of the University. Kids don’t mind a tincture of danger quite as much as we parents do. My old Chicago prof, Norman Maclean, describes this inclination of youth well in the beautiful book he wrote at the very end of his life: ‘Young Men and Fire’ - I asked my rising 1st year daughter if the tincture of danger was part of the attraction of U of C to her, and she said no. I pointed out that a professor had written a book called Young Men and Fire, and she said she didn’t think reading it would make the risk of being the victim of a violent crime, or U of C, more alluring to her.
OK, some more anecdotal evidence. Over the past 12 years, members of my family have lived in Chicago and used the CTA extensively (and the Metra hardly at all) for a total of about 15 person-years. mostly to and from Hyde Park. One of my children now lives in Logan Square and works in Hyde Park. He used to ride his bike to and from work a lot, but a series of fairly serious, fairly expensive (new bikes, doctor visits), and yes, quite traumatizing accidents have put him back on the CTA every day. In all that time, here’s the bad stuff that has happened: My son got his pocket picked on the platform of the Garfield Red Line station once. It was a kid, who took his $15 in cash and dropped the wallet with his credit cards and ID still in it.
When my daughter was a Chicago student, she used the CTA all the time to get around the city. My wife actually worked in Chicago for a year, and used the CTA to get to and from her job.
Neither my wife nor my daughter was ever a crime victim in Chicago. For a while, my daughter had a 4:00 am radio show on WHPK, and she would walk there at 3:30 am from her fairly distant dorm. without incident ever. My son was mugged, once, with actual (not just threatened) violence, walking through Hyde Park off campus at 1:00 am in mid-August (meaning, no one around). It was definitely traumatic, but he got over it quickly. He took the CTA more – that was safe.
Yes, I made these numbers up to show that even with wildly pessimistic numbers, the likelihood of being the victim of a crime on the CTA in the South Side is extremely low. As it turnes out, my pessimism was more than a little hyperbolic.
This paper from the DOJ suggests reporting was about 58% for violent crimes overall last time we asked the question (2010) and reporting in general is higher as the crime in question gets more severe. The 58% figure was up from 50% in 1994. Reporting of property crimes, meanwhile, was almost exactly 40%.
DOJ report #1: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/vnrp0610.pdf
Another DOJ report puts the number of Part I crimes (a.k.a. index crimes) on the CTA at 12.31 per million riders in 1994. Last year, the same figure was 4.03, per the Sun-Times article and CTA ridership figures. So overall crime (including thefts) has fallen to less than a third of its level in 1994.
DOJ report #2: https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/166372.pdf
Sun-Times article (again): http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/crime-on-cta-l-trains-buses-up-but-90-percent-of-serious-incidents-go-unsolved-the-watchdogs/
If we assume violent crimes are still reported at a rate of 42% or thereabouts, the CTA’s figure of 431 rises to 743, or 1.49 violent crimes per million riders in 2016, when 498 million rode the CTA. Assuming the reporting rate is still about 40% for property crimes, the remaining 1,575 crimes would rise to 3,940, or 7.91 per million riders. This yields overall totals of 9.40 crimes per million riders, of which 1.49 are violent (including actual violence or the threat thereof). A fraction of these crimes actually end in violence, but without detailed figures I can’t say what fraction that might be, short of an educated guess that it’s somewhere between 0% and 50%.
The figures for the most serious crimes (homicide, rape, and aggravated assault) jump from 10 to 17, though small sample size caveats apply. That’s about 0.03 per million riders.
By the numbers, the CTA is at least three times safer than it was in 1994.
I (short, not particularly athletic, extremely sheltered suburban kid) have actually been the victim of two violent crimes. One was a seemingly random, ultimately harmless attempted assault - not on the CTA, but walking to my NSP job in Washington Park. in the absence of any demands for property or attempts to take said property, I assume it wasn’t a robbery. The other was an attempted robbery in one of London’s safest neighborhoods, many moons ago. Both were highly unlikely occurrences, one more so than the other.
My personal takeaway was that stuff can happen no matter how I get from point A to point B, and I’d rather keep tutoring in Washington Park, walking around Hyde Park, and going about my everyday business than worry about another incident taking place against all odds. I did start taking the CTA to my NSP job - because, like @JHS 's son, I saw it as a safer transportation option. YMMV, and people can and will react differently, but that’s my experience and I feel the numbers back it up.
Hmm. Could be mistaken but the UChicago CC threads seem to have an over-representation of Hyde Park residents (current and former) who have at one point experienced a “mugging”. Is that right? Or is it more the case that the stats we are reading might be under-stated? Small sample but these testimonies suggest a higher number for robberies than .52 per 1,000 kids (or whatever the 2015 number might be).
@JBStillFlying The Chicago Tribune crime tracker (based on police reports) shows 95 robberies in Hyde Park over the past 365 days, while Wikipedia has a sourced extrapolation of 2010 census data that pegs the population of Hyde Park at 26,705. That would be 0.28 robberies per 1,000 residents.
http://crime.chicagotribune.com/chicago/community/hyde-park
Assuming a similar reporting rate to national figures (about 55-60%), 0.52 per 1,000 residents seems like the upper end of the range of possibilities.
The rate among UChicago students is likely higher than among residents in general, as we’re more likely to A. walk or take public transit (lower odds of a car crash, but walking or walking to transit raises the odds of encountering muggers) and B. venture into Washington Park/Woodlawn (particularly those living in the Woodlawn dorms/off-campus).
Mayor Rahm gets regular questions about policing and violence in the city, so I doubt the numbers are too far off. If the CPD was fudging the numbers, whether through malice, incompetence, or malicious incompetence, one would hope they’d do a better job of it.
Remember, there is a fairly high number of non-residents in Hyde Park daily. People come to Hyde Park to work at the hospital, at the MSI, faculty and administrators and staff at the university. I doubt that students living on campus are counted as residents for statistical purposes. So the actual incidence of crime is considerably lower than the per-resident figures would indicate, since many of the crime victims (including students) are not residents.
@JBStillFlying : This thread has two incidences of student muggings in the last 12 years, covering approximately 70,000 student-years.
To be clear, the assault on me on the U of C campus and the robbery in which I was mildly injured in the L station in the Loop both occurred in early 90s. So I’m not part of recent data.
But given how really rarely I rode the L, the fact that I personally was a victim of a robbery does make me question whether the (I guess?) 1 in 300,000 stat for violent crimes on the CTA in early 90s (I assume that includes waiting for buses and trains too, right?) is accurate. Maybe I was just tremendously unlucky. I did have a suitcase with me, which made me easier pickings. On the other hand, I was an alert adult (no headphones) traveling at 11 a.m. So this does make me question any methodology, the conclusion of which is that violent crime on the L was or is vanishingly rare.
Same for any descriptions about Hyde Park in the late 80s / early 90s. The young man who lived in my university-owned apartment south of the midway before I moved in was robbed at gunpoint coming home from class at 4 p.m. A few years later, I was the victim of a violent crime at almost the exact same location, even though I was only very rarely outside, especially alone, after dinner time, and was very alert to danger. My apartment was never burglarized, and I walked home in the dark around 4 or 5 or 6 p.m. from classes and activities for years before the attack occurred. So up to that point, I was cautious, but also felt I’d had an okay time of it, compared with the apartment’s previous occupant, and was happy to have saved a lot of money on rent of a private apartment. As I said, before I became a victim of violent crime, I could have said, “I’ve made it through 3 years here without being a victim of violent crime.”
I am hoping that things are safer in that area nowadays. It’s hard to tell, when so many who start out saying so end up saying that robberies aren’t that big a deal (or even part of the attraction of Hyde Park or city life!). Or it’s “everything is pretty safe around here … but be sure to always travel in groups”. Like that’s even remotely possible without having huge effects on a student’s life.
In any event, DD is going to be living and doing a lot of work within a 5-minute walk of where I was attacked, perhaps for the next 4 years. I don’t disagree that sometimes risks are worth it. I just don’t think we should misstate the risks, both because people who request information deserve the truth, so that they can make their own decisions, and because many college age people do tend to underestimate the risks already (until something bad happens to them or to a friend). It’s hard to avoid unduly alarming the anxious, while also giving a realistic picture to someone who maybe needs to hear that wandering around alone at 1 a.m. (or walking swiftly alone at 9 p.m. as I was doing) in Hyde Park does pose a risk, that headphones or earbuds or staring at your iPhone makes you more vulnerable, etc.
The .52/1000 students I referenced earlier is from the UChicago crime and safety report to the DOE. These are students, not residents.
@JHS the way I was actually looking at it is how many regular CC posters (or their family members) have been mugged while living in Hyde Park. @Marlowe1, you, @Lea111, and @DunBoyer all confirmed “yes” which actually surprised me. @Marlowe1 and @Lea111 were there two or more decades ago, your kid within the past 10-12 years, @DunBoyer is a 1st or 2nd year (from what I gather). Small sample I realize. But while all may be posters to this particular thread due to personal experience with a mugging, all of you were known CC posters (to me anyway) prior to that and came to the UChicago CC threads presumably for other reasons. And yet all of you share the same experience which suggests it’s really not THAT uncommon. I find that very interesting and it does make me wonder about @Lea111’s comments above which suggest the same thing.
Perhaps looking at the stat. per number of residents isn’t the way to look at it. First of all, residents aren’t students (the latter being more transient, less connected to or familiar with the community, considered more to be outsiders, etc.). Second, there might be high-risk times to be out - or on the CTA - that most residents don’t or wouldn’t do but some students are more likely to do, due to their schedules, or youth and more carefree behavior, or whatever. The good news is that it’s possible to take the data and look at it from that perspective to get a better idea of your true risk. Even someone who doesn’t take the CTA often can figure out that if the likelihood of being mugged exiting solo is highest at 10 pm, it might make better sense to Uber at that later hour. If students are being targeted (they were in my day and it would be silly to assume otherwise now even if overall crime rates are lower) so that your risk as a student is higher than your risk as a resident, it might make sense to take other precautions to keep yourself from being a statistic. I recall making lots of common sense adjustments of this type when in college (high crime area) and in grad school (higher crime area).
Those who enjoy stats to make their points (which would be all of us) might consider looking at the issue from these alternative angles. If anything it might challenge the notion that “stuff can happen”. Stuff may WELL happen, of course - the question is when and where.
Just for the sake of clarity, I was assaulted (and that’s a strong word - a homeless man, probably mentally ill, managed a single punch) in Washington Park, which has been less safe for pedestrians than Hyde Park for decades.
I also go out of my way to travel by foot, and walk halfway across the city if I’m not doing anything on a given weekend day. This probably raises my exposure to various dangers, including mugging.
@DunBoyer I would agree that your chances are greater, all else equal. And actually, ok, I’ve been assaulted too. But in the Loop. Was pushed into the street and called a white whore by a crazy homeless guy. Such is life in Chicago.
I attended the college in the 1980s. I was never mugged or threatened, and I don’t know anyone who was mugged or threatened. anecdotes about crime were common, but they never actually seemed to happen to anyone we knew.
Motorcyclists have an adage: Everyone who hasn’t been off his bike will be off his bike. I like the fatalism and allegorical universality of that thought… Everyone who hasn’t been mugged will be mugged. Or, as the Greeks were fond of saying, count no man lucky until he is dead.
@ThankYouforHelp perhaps they preyed on the grad students. We knew a few from that era who got mugged LOL.