A national Gallup Poll of people who don't live in Los Angeles—and by the looks of it have never visited—rates L.A. as the third most unsafe big city in America. The only ones that polled worse are Detroit and Washington. Hahn critic Mack Reed at LAVoice.org sees this as bad news for Mayor Hahn's reelection hopes. I don't get that. They don't vote here. If you did poll Angelenos who form their impressions by living here rather than off TV, I don't think very many would rate L.A. anywhere close to the most dangerous place—in Los Angeles County, let alone the nation. Anyway, the website CityMayors.com, using FBI stats for 2003, found L.A. the 35th safest big city for violent cimes and 28th safest for homicide. Worse on the murder list include Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, Miami, Phoenix, St. Louis, Cleveland, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Detroit, New Orleans...and so on. If you isolate on total crime in the 10 biggest cities, only San Diego and New York are actually safer than Los Angeles. The L.A. crime rate sits at almost half of worst-case Dallas and is lower than (in order) Detroit, Phoenix, San Antonio, Houston, Las Vegas and Philadelphia. That's not good enough, and I've heard nobody argue it is. But those Gallup pollees might want to turn off their TVs and get out in the real world more.

© 2003-2009   •  About LA Observed  •  Email the editor
LA Biz Observed
4:03 PM Fri | CBS and ABC have far bigger fish to fry - namely whether their stations can get back the auto and retail advertising that fell off a cliff in 2009.
Native Intelligence
Jenny Price | Recycling!
Veronique de Turenne | And there's still time to take part!
Phil Wallace | Searching for answers after a third loss this year.
Deanne Stillman | Jihad and cash offers meet American soldiers during the Gulf War, and beyond.
Iris Schneider | After a tough year financially, the Museum of Contemporary Art put on a gala party to celebrate with 1,000 of its closest friends.
Jenny Burman
Thinking more about buying less.
Here in Malibu
Seriously -- turn out the lights.
Sponsors
Jewish Journal logo
The California Wellness Foundation
Playa Vista ad
Blogads

Blogads Los Angeles network

Get RSS Feeds
of LA Observed
LA Observed publishes several Real Simple Syndication feeds for easy scanning of headlines. If you wish to subscribe to a feed, most popular RSS readers will do it for you. You can also enter the web address from the XML button below or click on a specific feed. For more help with RSS, try here or here.




Add to Google