<p>Twenty years ago, DW and I lived in an apartment in Chicago, literally right across the street from what was then Cabrini Green, one of the poster children for crime-ridden inner city Chicago (now gone and replaced by upscale condos). We bought a small farm in southwestern Wisconsin as an investment and weekend getaway. Our Wisconsin neighbors thought we were nuts to live in that crime-ridden city.</p>
<p>The upshot: the six years we owned the farm, we were burglarized four times (house three times, barn once), to the point where we had to install a burglar alarm system. In the same period, we had one incident where our car was broken into in Chicago. I used to run in the Chicago neighborhood at all hours of the day and night and was never harmed or felt myself in danger.</p>
<p>Yes, there’s crime in Chicago. However, it’s overwhelmingly poor minority people victimizing other poor minority people. In the rare situations where a white middle-class person is the victim of a poor minority person, it becomes a huge story, partly because of institutionalized racism in the local media but also partly because it IS rare.</p>