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The Planetizen News Brief - 6/25/09

25 June 2009 - 9:00am
Smart City Radio

The Planetizen News Brief is a weekly rundown of some of the most interesting and important news and issues of the past week.

The Planetizen News Brief airs every week on the nationally-syndicated radio program "Smart City", which is broadcast in cities across the U.S. Learn more about Smart City and listen to archived shows.

Full Transcript
City rankings are always contentious, whether it’s the best places to live or the worst places to find a job. Another of the more disliked lists (among cities, anyway) is the ranking of the most dangerous cities. But ranking entire cities by crime is often a misrepresentation of their actual crime rate. Some neighborhoods within a city can have very high rates of crime while others have little or none. To make the picture a little more accurate, the websites walletpop.com and neighborhoodscout.com have reviewed FBI data from the nation’s 17,000 local law enforcement agencies to identify the specific neighborhoods that have the highest rates and risks of crime. According to their report, the neighborhood near Central Parkway and Liberty Street in Cincinnati, Ohio, is the nation’s most dangerous, where residents have a 1 in 4 chance of being a victim of crime in one year. Chicago holds 4 of the top 25 spots; Baltimore, Dallas, Memphis and Kansas City each hold two.

One city that’s nowhere on that list is Lancaster, Pennsylvania. But based on a recent policy decision, you might think it was one of the most dangerous cities in the world. About 165 closed circuit security cameras will soon start rolling, capturing most activity in the city’s streets, parks and public spaces. According to a recent article from the Los Angeles Times, Lancaster has a fairly average rate of crime. But rising poverty and an increase in gang activity in and around the city has convinced a local crime commission that security cameras may be necessary to deter crime. And though many cities across the world have security cameras, the 165 planned for Lancaster are more than many other U.S. cities with greater populations than Lancaster’s 55,000. Though sanctioned by the city, the actual task of monitoring the streets has been outsourced to a private company, which will notify police when criminal activity is seen. Some citizens have threatened to move out, but for the most part, the cameras have sparked little outrage.

Meanwhile, America’s big cities are feeling a little left out. A recent report from the U.S. Conference of Mayors has criticized the federal government’s distribution of stimulus money, arguing that the nation’s smaller cities are receiving a disproportionately high amount of transportation money from the stimulus plan. The report says that 85 of the most populous metros has received only $8.8 billion of the $18 billion set aside for transportation. That’s less than half of the available funding, while these areas account for nearly two-thirds of the nation’s population. The mayors argue that stimulus money should break with tradition and flow directly to cities, rather than state governments, for more appropriate distribution.

Stories discussed in this week's Planetizen News Brief

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Instead of demeaning so-called "third world cities", we would do well to observe, understand, and adapt such approach on a much more widescale basis.
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