But Wait, There's More

I was out at a happy hour yesterday. For the food basically, I never learned to drink. The televisions were on, muted, and turned to the local broadcast channels. The evening news was on. The number of crime stories that ran was somewhat surprising. I know that news outlets have a tendency to run crime stories; "if it bleeds, it leads" and monetizing scaring people, and all that. But it seemed that more than half the newscast was simply one crime story after another. Given that the sound was off, I didn't get any of the details, but they wouldn't have been informative anyway.

But it explains why people in the local area claim to be afraid to go into Seattle unless they're armed. Which strikes me as ludicrous, but I suppose if  one sees "Man shot after walking past homeless encampment," multiple times in an evening (it seems that they run these stories on repeat), it starts to make a certain level of sense.

The faceless 'burb that I live in is dull by pretty much any standard. In the nearly two years I've lived in my current place I've seen the police mainly because they seem to show up across the street on a recurring basis. The only time other than that I'd seen officers in the neighborhood was when they were talking to the homeless guy who used to live in a van around the corner. (He cleared out just prior to the cold snap that landed in back in January, and hasn't returned.) So I'm always somewhat amused when people openly wonder if it's "safe." But then again, I'm a native of Chicago... and lived there when violent crime peaked nationwide back in the early 1990s. Nothing that happens here phases me.

But I've also stopped watching broadcast news, which always seems able to find a slew of random crime stories important enough that everyone needs to know about, but not enough so to be genuinely informative. This makes me less informed about "dangers" in the local area than some people like, but I find that I sleep better, so it's been a worthwhile trade.