Crime rate (the Darker Blue, the safer the area)
% population who identify as black
Downtown has a lot of robberies – it has a mix of rich people, alcohol and public transit. Crime stats can also skew the area around a courthouse if crimes like “failure to appear” are not filtered out.
It’s getting to the point where almost every day a body is found in the black neighborhoods in the morning. Charlotte has about 800,000 residents. The national average is 4.5 murders per 100,000 people per year. So if Charlotte was average, we would have 34 murders a year. Last year there were 60. A large portion of those were drug related. Charlotte is at the intersection of 2 major interstates which makes it a route used by drug traffickers. Heroin seems to be the big drug – as the DEA cracks down on OxyContin, people turn to the real thing
That heroin and OxyContin are really nasty. I support the programs in other countries where addicts can sign up and receive a safe, supervised dose to prevent overdose and the organized crime associated with the trafficking. It also causes them to register and appear in a place that can offer them help with their addiction. As you mention with the substitution, addicts will find what they need or a substitute.
A substitute in NY was also in the news today. Marijuana is still illegal so people used a synthetic marijuana that turned them into zombies. Another case of the solution being worse than the problem.
Look at Colorado the roads have become safer and crime declined once marijuana as been re-legalized. I don’t condone the use of it, but I recognize reality.
When I was in Derby CT, the only person who befriended me after my medical problem was a woman who had spent a year in prison for drugs. She was on Medicaid and had back problems and had one of those implants. She frequently wound up at the emergency room when she ran out of pills.
One day, she needed a ride to the doctor’s office. I don’t think she was his patient before then. It was interesting to see the process. She opened my eyes to how pervasive drug use was in the area, which is part of why I was motivated to leave.
CT was stringing her along on probation for no particular reason other than employing probation officers. She eventually moved to be with her daughter in Texas. The one and only time I visited her in her apartment she was watching some cable channel with 24 Hr/day stories about women who murdered men to take their money. Okey dokey – see ya around!
I have a family member who has smoked pot for 40 plus years. You do not want to legalize pot.
On the synthetic – K2 eh? I think we see the pilot episode for the Walking Dead.
It is worth saying that this is at least in part a situation where cause and effect are backwards. When the perception of crime goes up, white people flee, leaving a vacuum. There is no other alternative to the “civil rights shield of invulnerability” as White Hispanic George Zimmerman found out. When the white (and middle class blacks) people capitulate, the vacuum pulls in the people more inclined to commit crime. That isn’t the black people who grew up here – it is the outsiders from LA, Chicago, New York, etc who Obama enticed to move here in 2012 to try to turn NC into a blue state. That’s the real subtext of the HB2 debate – it had very little to do with transgender bathrooms
Trump in the news today for his speech last night saying building the wall will be easy because there are no bathrooms. Bathrooms are hard, he said. lol
Require separate bathrooms for undocumented migrants with the comforts of home
When I look at the blob, I see Caitlyn Jenner’s boob.
The boob is planning to be in Cleveland next week.