In six years living in a stable historic black neighborhood in Philadelphia, a neighborhood going back to free black people in the 1830's (my rental two-story brick row house was three blocks from the house where the opera star Marian Anderson grew up) there were two active criminal youth gangs nearby, but on my block there was a solid neighborhood committed to resistance to crime. The kids on my block talked to me and told me everything about who was doing what. Most of the folks stayed out of crime and drugs; the men mostly worked, and a lot of the women. There were a lot of retirees, they all knew me by name, and they greeted me daily. There was crime, but more than in Eugene/Springfield? I don't think so.

In other poor neighborhoods there was considerable crime, without regard to skin color. The correlating factor was poverty. Of course, the very big crime dollars are stolen in the corporate sector.