Interesting Map?

I wonder what it would look like if you superimposed the crime map over it?

Here are the other cities:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/72157624812674967/with/5010995882/

What about superimposing voting districts?

What an enlightening conversation. I'm so proud to say I hang out on this board. What is this, Swamp Bubbles?

To imply that there is an actual correlation between one's race and a predilection for crime or voting habits is irresponsible and reprehensible.

A predilection for crime and for a certain voting tendency are habits of the individual, not of the race the individual belongs to. Crime spreads through many social and cultural factors. Voting habits are even more representative of the individual, based on world views, personal experiences, education, among others.

I wish I was going to be around when the world settles in on a neutral shade of person and people who think race actually means something are looked at like archaic relics of a bygone era.

And if you don't fully understand my post, don't even bother responding. I'm not here to argue with cavemen. Yes, I am being condescending, but people who believe or suggest race determines how an individual acts don't deserve the air they breathe.

"To imply that there is an actual correlation between one's race and a predilection for crime or voting habits is irresponsible and reprehensible."

I'm going to be walking on thin ice here but let's give it a go.

Do you believe that one could not draw a statistical correlation for voting habits or crime statistics given racial densities? I'd like to believe the answer is no, but I also like to wear rose colored glasses. The truth is there likely would be statistical correlations, which is not to say that individuals stories would not deviate from the trends but on a larger scale we would likely see these connections.

The question then turns to what else could we map against this data. What if we could chart opportunity? We could graph the average household inheritance, ancestral family education level, or an average ancestral social status index. Now we're getting a little exotic but the point is that these maps show a lot more that a current snapshot of our social fabric. We are seeing the cumulative effects of centuries of multi-faceted oppression. To presume that the after effects of our history are nonexistence is simply dishonest.

I'm not sure we can get past our racist heritage if we are so willing to deny the realities of the society we've inherited. Maybe, I'm wrong. Maybe the rose colored glasses approach will get us there more quickly by changing peoples expectations, or maybe it will just blind us from the actual problems that divide this nation. Whatever the best path is, I hope we find it.

B-Swell because you choose to ignore facts doesn't make your argument correct. It's not a racial thing, it's a cultural thing. Nobody is born predestined to crime, illiteracy or failure. I've been around and employed African Americans that would would out work fat, 40 something union WASP (I can say that cause I'm a WASP) any day of the week and I was proud to have them. But to argue that there are not sects of people in this country that choose to live at the lowest level of society is completely baseless.

Areas with the highest levels of violent crime, inner cities are filled with predominately Afro Americans. Highest areas for theft and property damage, inner city. Highest areas of illiteracy & single parents, you guessed it inner cities. These areas are very Democratic, I'm sorry there are correlations that can be backed by facts you just can't ignore. More people have died due to violent crime in our cites this year than in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. I'm sorry but the majority of offenders in these cases are African American.

The modern Black culture teaches you to chase fast money, to glorify the dealer or the man who scams the system, if you want something take it (no matter if it's yours or not) and if your bitches gets out of line slap that hoe. These messages bleed through all their forms of entertainment, doubt me than turn on BET for a couple of mins. Tell me if you see a show telling kids to do their home work or spinners, big booties (which are awesome), and money flying through the air. And we wonder why they are facing such a moral decline. They have taken the American consumer lust to the ultimate level and live inside a hyper misogynistic dream.

The Black culture has lost it soul and direction. When brave leaders like Mr. Cosby and Colin Powell try to step to the forefront and challenge their race to rise above their trappings, they get heckled and called Uncle Tom and told "you aint no real n word". I was in Detroit the day Robert Bobb and Bill Cosby held a come back to school rally and had a few hours to spare between meetings (I love Cosby stand up from the 70's and wanted to meet him). There where more blacks on the outskits of the event yelling "go back home Oreo n word we don't need you in the D" than there was people attending the rally. :(

No matter how poor you are it doesn't give you the right to commit violent crime or to destroy the neighborhoods you live in. I'm sorry but where there are high levels of African Americans there are high levels of crime and low property values. Facts you can not dispute.

The statements above do not let Johnny Whitetrash rotting his teeth out on Meth Mountain Kentucky off the hook.

Please be honest with me B-Swell (because although I rarely agree with you, you are very intelligent) if you had the choice would dump you life savings into a home and send your children to a school in the blackest neighborhood of Toledo? Until you get people and business who want to invest their saving in your neighborhoods you will continue to struggle. The Black culture does itself no favors.

I acknowledge the statistical correlation, and it is a marker of our racist heritage.

I don't know how we can fix the problems either, and I don't suggest ignoring such statistical correlations.

What really disappoints me is when people take such statistical correlations and draw simple conclusions that fit their limited and ignorant world views.

An ACTUAL correlation would deny the free will of the individual or place the individual in a situation they cannot change. The only example that readily comes to mind that is actually related to race is hereditary diseases and physical traits. The individual cannot change his genes but he can decide who he wants to represent him/if he will lead a life of crime.

Thanks for helping me take the conversation to where it needed to go, Hank. I hope our nation and city can fix such problems also.

"... and people who think race actually means something are looked at like archaic relics of a bygone era."

On issues like this, we need to turn to our political elite for insight and guidance.

Former Toledo Mayor and current member of the Toledo Public School Board, Jack Ford, gave reasons why people move from Toledo to the outlying communities. He said of the suburbs:

Jack Ford suggested ways to improve Toledo:

Oh, forgot to add then Mayor Jack Ford's business philosophy :

As a former mayor and current school board member, do Ford's comments or thinking help or hurt Toledo?

What would party affiliation matter when most poor, inner-city, African Americans don't actually vote?

... in the same way that poor, inner-city, uneducated white people don't usually vote.

To imply that there is an actual correlation between one's race and a predilection for crime or voting habits is irresponsible and reprehensible.

First, you are correct. Correlation is never a determination of causation. That is analysis that must go on at a much deeper level.

However, there are incredibly strong correlations, in races nationwide, that African-Americans vote overwhelmingly for other African-Americans (if given a choice between candidates of different ethnicities) and vote overwhelmingly for the Democratic candidate. There's nothing racist or reprehensible about that--it's just reading the numbers.

President Obama received 96% of the African-American vote in 2008 and it was not just because every single African-American voter looked at his in-depth positions on Iraq, green jobs, and "hope":

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15297.html

In this case, you absolutely can make a very strong predictive case how this segment of voters will cast their ballots. Of course, it does not prove causation. But you send me to Vegas with a 96/100 chance something will happen and I'll max out my credit cards placing bets.

And 83% of blacks voted for Clinton in 1992, so can we say only 13% of blacks in a particular way because of race? Just think how much time and effort the GOP spend in the 90s and 00s courting the black vote (sarcasm).

As the saying goes - "lies, damn lies and statistics"

I can say statisitcally the more churches a city has the more murders and rapes it has. Of course there isn't any causation, but there is correlation.

In haste, I'd like to simply add that toledolen gets close to what I think is the greater issue -- poverty. What an earlier poster (sorry, as I said, in a rush) referred to as "black culture" is more accurately noted as the effects of chronic, generational poverty (low education rates; high joblessness; inability to see or set long-term goals because of the more immediate pressures of the here-and-now claustrophobia of poverty) -- all of which is about as colorless a phenomenon as you can get, imho. This passing reference to "black culture" is way off the mark, especially if you think, for example, that hip-hop signifies black culture, since white suburban youth are the biggest consumers of hip-hop music, and it doesn't seem to interfere with their private weekend tutoring for upcoming SAT tests.... So-called "black culture" IS, in many ways, mainstream youth culture now. Denigrate it if you like (that's a separate thread), but don't twist it in an effort to create false correlations that have more the whiff of blame than explanation.

luvtoledo well thought out and greatly said, but I will never except your income level as an excuse for violent crime and degradation of neighborhoods. Do to so is to hand your life and safety over to someone just because "they need the money". If your argument is to be proven true, then please tell me why we do not see rampant murder and violence in the poor white south? I've been to parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama where the average person makes less than 15k a year, lives in a govt funded shack, and reads at a 6th grade level, yet you don't see the sad story of people being murdered on a daily basis and people standing on the corner of town selling drugs.

No matter what your starting point, you choose your path in life. To argue otherwise is to continue down the spiral of lack of personal responsibility we suffer from in this country.

Call me a a cynic or maybe someone who rejects this myth of the common goodness of humanity, as thousands of years of recorded history have proven do me that human beings will revel in the extremes to which people will go to debase themselves while questing to murder, steal, or whatever crime we wage against each other in the in the acquisition of wealth or fulmination of Ego. To believe int he myth of "human goodness" is to reject of the conventional, the industrial, the orderly. It's an embrace of the sloppy, messy, glorious truth of the individual.

You are correct that suburban white teens are by far the largest consumers of the hip hop era of entertainment. But I also watched Heat, Heist, and all sorts of bank robbery / hold up movies as a child but I have yet to rob a bank. My argument is the entertainment is the product of the culture and not the reverse you seem to point at. Art imitates life and not the other way around. I will not put my head in the sand and continually mumble the mantra of "people are good, people are good, people are good" while my neighborhood falls apart as certain people are migrated into it by federal section 8 dollars. I don't have anger against these people because of the color of their skin, because of what they do to town and neighborhoods. And by "these people" I don't mean Afro American, I mean those who fall into this poverty demographic you speak of (the racial makeup speaks for itself). The Black culture revels in this baseless lifestyle.

Just because you are born white doesn't mean you are born with a silver spoon in your mouth, a free ride to Harvard, and a house in the burbs.