Respite unnoticed

I guess I understand the "hangover of perception" that is discussed in this article. It's not unlike the perception that people who live in "safe" neighborhoods feel -- it's unrealistic to believe that bad things could not happen in particular places, thus when something bad happens, it's a dramatic horror because that "hangover" is the one that says that person has the right to feel safe.



The real question for me is, if we all felt that we had the right to feel (and be) safe, would that make our neighborhoods safer? That is to say, would we behave in ways that would make our neighborhoods safer? If we never feel safe, we never go out. If we don't go out, we cannot help to make our neighborhoods safer. Just a hypothesis, I guess. I wonder how you could prove it?



Here are my favorite quotes from the article:

As the weekend approached, with its promise of gunplay, law enforcement officials said Friday that they had passed a new threshold: 33 days without a murder, the longest stretch since 1963, when there were no homicides for 40 days.
...
“Perception lags reality,” he said. “You have a high homicide rate, and you start to get it under control, but you suffer from the hangover of perception, and that lasts awhile.” That lag is especially pronounced in neighborhoods here that have suffered longest from poverty, neglect, and as centers of the drug trade. Everyone in those neighborhoods has heard the shooting and, more often than not, can point to the spot of a recent killing.