Did you check any crime stats for the neighborhood, or were you expecting to see burglary, rape and murder as you drove by that second? Someone tells you it's bad, and all you notice is the color of people's skin.
Nope.
Actually, I was standing on the street, not driving. This "bad neighbourhood" was 50 yards from where I was standing. If they wanted to rob people, they'd have found better pickings where I was standing than in the "bad neighbourhood".
I didn't have a car; we were visiting my sister-in-law. I'm accustomed to walking everywhere, unless I have an inter-city journey. The town was Charlottesville, VA, but I was told much the same when I settled (briefly) in Richmond, VA.
> Someone tells you it's bad, and all you notice is the color of people's skin.
What I noticed was what's obvious. In a majority-white city, the so-called bad neighbourhood had exclusively black people on the street. And I noticed, for example, that every time I drove to work, there was a car pulled over on the freeway, with two black guys lying face-down, with cops pointing guns at their heads. I never saw this with white guys. My drive to work was just 15 minutes, but I saw this daily.
Do they actually do block-by-block crime statistics in these places? Because what I find shocking is that the granularity of this "bad neighbourhood" thing appears to be the block.