Maybe the reason I grew up thinking Lawrence was overall ~dangerous and crimey~ is because I lived in the area that’s marked with the red X on this map during that time; I find it hard to believe the neighborhood by neighborhood stats are the same or even close to the same now as they were when I lived there multiple decades ago, and if not maybe it’s just what I was exposed to (the people my parents kept company with, getting the shit beat out of me by a classmate on my way home from school in 2nd grade— I was allowed to walk alone to and from school at Weatherbee starting in 1st grade if that tells you anything, and at some point that’s fuzzy timewise there was the murder of a neighbor) along with what everyone around me was always saying (“Joe Schmoe is a drug dealer😮”) at the point in my life when I was young, impressionable, and didn’t have a great grasp on the world around me yet

https://imgur.com/gallery/UepAZ1s