According to boston.com, Boston had 72 murders in 2010. If you run your finger down the long list in the location category, 32 times you’ll point to Dorchester. This means that last year, when someone was murdered in Boston, 44 percent of the time it happened in the neighborhood many UMB students call home, affectionately called DOT.
Why should one neighborhood of Boston, population 92,000, host 44 percent of all murders in a city of over 600,000? Why is it that 15 percent of the Boston population accounts for almost half its murders?
Mass Media asked both Dorchester residents and those living elsewhere to give their opinion of Dorchester. The most common response to the question “Is Dorchester safe?” was “Dorchester has both safe and unsafe areas.”
“In some areas, it’s safe,” answered Melissa Juarez, sociology major. If only some areas are safe, that means that other areas are unsafe. Where exactly are these unsafe areas? Conveniently, there is a map that accompanies the data presented on boston.com that pinpoints the locations of the murders (these being the severest of crimes, they are a good indicator). Many of them occurred along the main roads – Columbia Avenue and Blue Hill Avenue, for example. But, I’ve also heard bad stories about bus routs along DOT Ave (another main road) and about Field’s Corner.
“I live in a good part,” says Hellen Gillet, a criminal justice major at UMB. “But I have friends in areas I would never walk in.” This feeling of being unsafe in one’s own neighborhood, or a friend’s neighborhood, isn’t uncommon.
What does this all have to do with being a UMB student? Not much. This has to do with being a resident. Your school just so happens to be located in an infamous neighborhood. But, an overwhelming majority of those interviewed, regardless of whether they lived in Dorchester or not, admitted that there are good parts and bad parts.
If you are smart, you will stay safe. This isn’t your mommy telling you to be careful. Let’s be realistic: we’re in college. Safety isn’t always a concern, especially not when we’re partying or going out into the city. We want to have fun between tests and papers. It’s a large part of our college experience.
Still, this doesn’t mean you have to be an idiot. Sure, sometimes bad things happen regardless of what you’re doing. Take car accidents, for example – they are accidents, they happen. Even so, something as menial as a fender bender is small potatoes compared to what occasionally fills the headlines in the Dorchester Reporter, like “Two charged with firing guns on Savin Hill Street” or “Friendly night on the porch ends in argument, murder.”
A crucial piece of advice is this: avoid drugs and certainly do not deal them. Many crimes are committed because of something having to do with drugs. If you mix with those crowds you’re asking for trouble.
Finally, an important note to people outside of DOT and parents who are sending their children here: you don’t have to be worried about your daughter or son being murdered. Statistically speaking, while Dorchester may be highly represented in Boston crime, of the 92,000 living here, most were not murdered. Be realistic.
A lot of crime pops up in neighborhoods that don’t get this kind of attention. Do you think there have been no murders in your own hometown? Even without murder, other crime still happens. I live in a small middle/upper-middle class neighborhood 30 minutes north of Boston called Danvers, population about 26,500. Last year, though Danvers didn’t have any murders, it had 6 rapes, 8 robberies, and 32 assaults.
Who has heard of Danvers? Not as many as have heard of Dorchester. While rape is astonishing news in Danvers, rape in Dorchester is seen as par for the course.
There is crime everywhere. If you’re careful, most of the time you can avoid it. As students, we have enough to deal with in school without adding a police record or crime victimhood as well.
