What you don’t know cultivates irrational fear

3:52 PM Friday, June 19, 2009

If you’ve lived in Springfield very long, you know some stuff.

Like the epicenter of crime is along South Yellow Springs Street.

Or that north of Buck Creek is where the crime isn’t.

You know some stuff, but it’s wrong.

If there’s one thing that Valerie Lough’s story in today’s News-Sun makes clear, it’s that stereotypes about crime, like stereotypes about a lot of things, often don’t hold much water.

Moreover, an entire section of the city has been maligned and even avoided because of assumptions that simply aren’t borne out by the numbers.

If you’re a northender, you may take in the southern part of the city only when you have to pass through it, and at about 35 mph.

Many skeptics have benefited from Mayor Warren Copeland’s occasional bus tour of the city. Copeland, a Wittenberg professor and a resident of the South End, sometimes takes people around the city and shows them Springfield from an urban studies viewpoint.

He nearly always catches people off guard by driving down streets in the south end of neatly kept, middle-class houses in neighborhoods where residents are obviously proud of where they reside.

There are areas in all corners of the city with crime problems. Just go to our Web site, SpringfieldNewsSun.com, and check out the interactive map of police incident reports.

Crime has many victims, including people who live with an irrational fear of it.

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