What leads you to conflate poverty with criminal activity, and proceed to victim-blame those who dare complain about criminal activity?
Data clearly shows a correlation between crime levels and average income in an area. Are we not mostly engineers used to working with data here? In fact, needing to "survive" is a common excuse used to justify the crimes committed in impoverished areas. Note that I said correlation, not causation. If someone has data that says otherwise, please provide it because I would be genuinely intrigued.
Isn't "correlation does not imply causality" already a household expression? If we are engineers why are we insisting in specious reasoning?