Please read the first line in the main body of your article and you’ll find the answer. It’s so predictable it’s more accurate than science.
Cronulla was a one-off event almost 20 years ago, was extremely shocking and out of the ordinary, and as far as I can remember no-one died. As such, it’s not a great example of anything much, other than the fact that ethnic tensions existed between white and Arab communities in Australia in the mid-2000s (which is not all that surprising given the context of 9/11, the Iraq War, etc)
I do agree with your first point, however, that Sydney is a good example of one of the most multicultural cities in the world being quite safe, without requiring authoritarian policing (lockouts and drug dogs in train stations aside)
But I’ll stop you right there from swaying the blame onto someone else and reaching entirely false conclusions. What crime is NOT due to:
- Crime is not due to poverty. Plenty of poor cities who aren’t violent.
- Crime is not due to previous crime. Put white felons on an island and you get Australia, as the joke says.
- Crime is not due to high-density area. Tokyo.
- Crime is not due to immigration or displacing population. Ukraine migrant kids who spoke French astonishingly fluently in 6 months, a better score than all kids from “other” French backgrounds.
- Crime is not due to mixing population. Singapore.
Each of them is easily proven by finding great counter-examples of constructive people being moved/concentrated to place X or Z and not having high criminality.
It must be something else, something which can be found in all evoked areas and not found in peaceful areas, but I’m not going to say it.
Is it water?
Also, your list doesn't mean some combination of those things can't result in worsening incidence of violent crime.
My own belief is that its some combination of:
- Extreme wealth inequality
- High cost of living
- High incidence of poverty (relative to the aforementioned cost of living)
- Poor social safety net
- Poor community cohesion and trust
- Individualistic cultural attitudes (as opposed to collectivist cultural attitudes)
- Poor public protection
- Easy access to drugs (including alcohol)
I think the drugs just become a symptom of the problem; people get addicted because they are suffering (see rat park). They develop antisocial behaviours, which reduces community cohesion and trust. The city then becomes less happy overall, and it becomes a cycle
When kicked out of the front door, try to come back through the backdoor?
You can create convoluted science that a combination of those factors leads to violence. Since it’s a combination, it’s even less provable, a correlation doesn’t cause causation, and I’ll keep finding counter examples, to which you will find even more convoluted reasons.
But there is a much, much simpler hypothesis, and for my part it explains the world with accuracy and predictability. What defines a science is its ability to predict the future based on some inputs.
So, my stance is to never make a decision based on prejudice, which is satisfying in terms of humanism, but don’t forget that people will reliably get killed, mugged and raped, and in quantity, if you don’t watch out for the thing-I’ll-not-say which was ever predictable. And it’s both our responsibility to put our family out of harm’s way, and an incredible feat of the XXIth century that we’re feeding our own relatives into a crime machine that reliably gets them killed or raped.
Speaking from experience. But everyone who has a grave opinion on this topic has, someday, seen a relative crossing the path of those people.