Don't tell mama...
A warning: Please do not read this post if you are prone to worrying about me living here. Seriously. This topic has been on my mind and is a big part of living in this city, but it's also quite possibly proof of my mother's deepest fears. No one ever said that Mexico City was safe and placid, now, did they?
During my first ever visit New York City, back in 1999, there was a horrific crime committed on the streets of the Upper East Side: in the middle of the afternoon, a homeless man, for reasons unknown, approached a young woman from behind and struck her hard across the bank of the head with a brick. The woman survived but required significant hospital care.
I was mildly obsessed with this incident, poking at the bruise for weeks from the shock and fascination. Completely random! Middle of the day! Upper East Side!
Growing up as I did in Edmonton, cuddly city of innocence tucked into the heart of prairie Alberta, we could rely on one fact: if we stayed away from drugs and bad people and just generally kept our noses clean, it was almost certain we'd be just fine. Prostitutes and unsupervised children were at risk, but the rest of us could go about our lives without fear for our safety at the hands of others.
But if it ever was that idyllic, the times are changing. On December 26th, 2005, on the corner of Toronto's main drag - Yonge & Bloor - a 15 year old girl out with friends seeking some post-Christmas bargains was caught in gang-related crossfire and died right there on the sidewalk.
Yet I would argue that the perception of personal safety persists in Canada. Despite periodic murders that shock and horrify the nation, we (and by "we" I am making a not-insignificant exclusion of young black males in urban centres) generally remain true to the belief that murders happen to the drug-inflicted, the "at-risk" and, every now and then, the deeply unfortunate. Even the fables of New York City seem a small and almost insignificant detail in a larger tapestry: I have several female friends who live and work on these streets and - touch wood - have never been attacked by brick-wielding maniacs or stabbed randomly by the guy next to them while sitting calmly on the subway.
But we are not in Edmonton or Toronto or even New York, are we? I'm just starting to realize that.
Last week, my coworker left suddenly in the middle of the day. I, plugged into my music, didn't actually notice until much later, when my boss, giggling, told me that my coworker had left after receiving the news that a close friend of hers had just been murdered in an open air market.
"You're giggling!" I said to her, amazed.
"Ah, I know. It's awful." She said, meaning both the murder and her reaction to it.
The giggling was not the result of the murder, nor was it the result of what my coworker was at that moment going through, but rather it was due to the fact that this is not actually big news.
When Jane Creba was shot in Toronto, her face was on the cover of every single newspaper across the country for at least a week. Stop anyone on the streets of Toronto and I guarantee that 80% of them could tell you her name and/or pick her face out from a selection of photos. That she was young and innocent, that the murder happened in the middle of the day and in such a public place - this was unspeakable horror to most Canadians. Toronto Police stated sorrowfully that, as of December 26th and the death of Jane Creba, "Toronto has lost its innocence."
I looked the next days for news of the murder of a young girl in a market here and found nothing. There were some photos of another young girl who had been shot multiple times and left to die in a public place (there are at least three major newspapers here that on a daily basis prominently feature corpse photos on their front pages) but this had been a narcotrafficking hit, not random. The murder of my coworker's friend was unremarkable and overlooked entirely.
Since then, I have asked everyone I know well the following intensely personal question: "Have any of your close friends or family members been murdered?" I asked them to exclude friends of friends of friends (even I know someone then) and people who quote/unquote "deserved it" (eg. narcotraffickers, who have a very short shelflife in this country as the three major cartels regularly bump each other in grand theatrical design as part of their quest for national domination).
The answer, with only one exception so far, has been "Yes."
Just how dangerous is Mexico City?
In 2005, Canada had a national murder rate of 2.0 per 100,000 people, working out to about 640 people murdered annually across the country. Edmonton actually has one of the highest murder rates, with 44 in 2005. Toronto, oh great Canadian behemoth of crime and peversity, is actually per capita one of the safest major city in Canada with between 80 and 90s murders per year among its 4+ million inhabitants. Of these, only one or two per year are random, the rest being gang-related or with the victim knowing their attacker.
(As a sidenote, even though Canada's murder rate is significantly lower than the United States, did you know our rate for sexual assaults is more than double?: 0.733089 per 1,000 people compared to the United States 0.301318 per 1,000 people, according to The Seventh United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems. Bloody hell.)
The crime rate in Mexico City appears to have leveled off in recent years, after seeing a dramatic spike after the devaluation of the peso in 1994 threw the majority of the country into sudden and desperate poverty. In 2002, there were 13.04 murders per 100,000 nationally, with the majority relating to drug trafficking. Mexico City sees between 2.1 and 2.5 murders per day, which sounds pretty bad but consider this: if Mexico City had the murder rate of the American bad seed, Houston, Texas, they would see more than 3,200 murders per year.
(I should be citing all these references, shouldn't I? I'm just Googling "murder statistics 2006" and the city names if anyone wants to chase up on any of them.)
So is it bad here? Yes. It is. This is not a safe city, as can be evidenced by the long list of legitimate warnings given to tourists: don't trust the police, don't hail taxis on the streets, don't carry money. This is also a city of 20 million people, though, with a national poverty line of $150 a month and 65% of people living under it, so it's all a bit to be expected, no?
But, as my stepmother once mused when I was railing to move to New York, "It's the random violence that bothers me."
Am I worried now? I am, admittedly, a little preoccupied and am seeing this city and this country perhaps a little clearer than I did when I swallowed the potential for all rational fear and moved here, but I'm not particularly worried. I live a tame life, even compared to the average person: I don't drink and shun bars and nightclubs; I don't even know anyone who does drugs; I'm usually in bed by 10:30 or, on wild nights, watching videos in the living room with friends; and I have made a point of learning which neighbourhoods it is best to stay away from as a redheaded foreigner. Plus I remain somewhat buffered by my Canadian naiveté - this steadfast confidence in my right to live a full, quiet, obedient life until the day that a traffic accident or cellular failure takes me down - and 30 years of cultural conditioning are hard to break.
But suddenly these quaint urban ghost stories of freak attacks - stories told to give you a little thrill of horror and a flood of relief for your own blessings - don't seem quite so quaint.
During my first ever visit New York City, back in 1999, there was a horrific crime committed on the streets of the Upper East Side: in the middle of the afternoon, a homeless man, for reasons unknown, approached a young woman from behind and struck her hard across the bank of the head with a brick. The woman survived but required significant hospital care.
I was mildly obsessed with this incident, poking at the bruise for weeks from the shock and fascination. Completely random! Middle of the day! Upper East Side!
Growing up as I did in Edmonton, cuddly city of innocence tucked into the heart of prairie Alberta, we could rely on one fact: if we stayed away from drugs and bad people and just generally kept our noses clean, it was almost certain we'd be just fine. Prostitutes and unsupervised children were at risk, but the rest of us could go about our lives without fear for our safety at the hands of others.
But if it ever was that idyllic, the times are changing. On December 26th, 2005, on the corner of Toronto's main drag - Yonge & Bloor - a 15 year old girl out with friends seeking some post-Christmas bargains was caught in gang-related crossfire and died right there on the sidewalk.
Yet I would argue that the perception of personal safety persists in Canada. Despite periodic murders that shock and horrify the nation, we (and by "we" I am making a not-insignificant exclusion of young black males in urban centres) generally remain true to the belief that murders happen to the drug-inflicted, the "at-risk" and, every now and then, the deeply unfortunate. Even the fables of New York City seem a small and almost insignificant detail in a larger tapestry: I have several female friends who live and work on these streets and - touch wood - have never been attacked by brick-wielding maniacs or stabbed randomly by the guy next to them while sitting calmly on the subway.
But we are not in Edmonton or Toronto or even New York, are we? I'm just starting to realize that.
Last week, my coworker left suddenly in the middle of the day. I, plugged into my music, didn't actually notice until much later, when my boss, giggling, told me that my coworker had left after receiving the news that a close friend of hers had just been murdered in an open air market.
"You're giggling!" I said to her, amazed.
"Ah, I know. It's awful." She said, meaning both the murder and her reaction to it.
The giggling was not the result of the murder, nor was it the result of what my coworker was at that moment going through, but rather it was due to the fact that this is not actually big news.
When Jane Creba was shot in Toronto, her face was on the cover of every single newspaper across the country for at least a week. Stop anyone on the streets of Toronto and I guarantee that 80% of them could tell you her name and/or pick her face out from a selection of photos. That she was young and innocent, that the murder happened in the middle of the day and in such a public place - this was unspeakable horror to most Canadians. Toronto Police stated sorrowfully that, as of December 26th and the death of Jane Creba, "Toronto has lost its innocence."
I looked the next days for news of the murder of a young girl in a market here and found nothing. There were some photos of another young girl who had been shot multiple times and left to die in a public place (there are at least three major newspapers here that on a daily basis prominently feature corpse photos on their front pages) but this had been a narcotrafficking hit, not random. The murder of my coworker's friend was unremarkable and overlooked entirely.
Since then, I have asked everyone I know well the following intensely personal question: "Have any of your close friends or family members been murdered?" I asked them to exclude friends of friends of friends (even I know someone then) and people who quote/unquote "deserved it" (eg. narcotraffickers, who have a very short shelflife in this country as the three major cartels regularly bump each other in grand theatrical design as part of their quest for national domination).
The answer, with only one exception so far, has been "Yes."
Just how dangerous is Mexico City?
In 2005, Canada had a national murder rate of 2.0 per 100,000 people, working out to about 640 people murdered annually across the country. Edmonton actually has one of the highest murder rates, with 44 in 2005. Toronto, oh great Canadian behemoth of crime and peversity, is actually per capita one of the safest major city in Canada with between 80 and 90s murders per year among its 4+ million inhabitants. Of these, only one or two per year are random, the rest being gang-related or with the victim knowing their attacker.
(As a sidenote, even though Canada's murder rate is significantly lower than the United States, did you know our rate for sexual assaults is more than double?: 0.733089 per 1,000 people compared to the United States 0.301318 per 1,000 people, according to The Seventh United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems. Bloody hell.)
The crime rate in Mexico City appears to have leveled off in recent years, after seeing a dramatic spike after the devaluation of the peso in 1994 threw the majority of the country into sudden and desperate poverty. In 2002, there were 13.04 murders per 100,000 nationally, with the majority relating to drug trafficking. Mexico City sees between 2.1 and 2.5 murders per day, which sounds pretty bad but consider this: if Mexico City had the murder rate of the American bad seed, Houston, Texas, they would see more than 3,200 murders per year.
(I should be citing all these references, shouldn't I? I'm just Googling "murder statistics 2006" and the city names if anyone wants to chase up on any of them.)
So is it bad here? Yes. It is. This is not a safe city, as can be evidenced by the long list of legitimate warnings given to tourists: don't trust the police, don't hail taxis on the streets, don't carry money. This is also a city of 20 million people, though, with a national poverty line of $150 a month and 65% of people living under it, so it's all a bit to be expected, no?
But, as my stepmother once mused when I was railing to move to New York, "It's the random violence that bothers me."
Am I worried now? I am, admittedly, a little preoccupied and am seeing this city and this country perhaps a little clearer than I did when I swallowed the potential for all rational fear and moved here, but I'm not particularly worried. I live a tame life, even compared to the average person: I don't drink and shun bars and nightclubs; I don't even know anyone who does drugs; I'm usually in bed by 10:30 or, on wild nights, watching videos in the living room with friends; and I have made a point of learning which neighbourhoods it is best to stay away from as a redheaded foreigner. Plus I remain somewhat buffered by my Canadian naiveté - this steadfast confidence in my right to live a full, quiet, obedient life until the day that a traffic accident or cellular failure takes me down - and 30 years of cultural conditioning are hard to break.
But suddenly these quaint urban ghost stories of freak attacks - stories told to give you a little thrill of horror and a flood of relief for your own blessings - don't seem quite so quaint.
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