Relationships between poverty and violent crime, specifically children growing up in poor households, have been well known for a very long time and the relationship continues to be shown repeatedly. See e.g. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS2468-2...
> I’ve been to impoverished areas of China and it was safer than any place in the US for example.
If I had a nickel for every time someone said "I saw something once, so the entire history of collected statistics must be wrong" I'd be very rich. It happens in China too. See for instance https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
The only real questions are about specific actionable causes and why crime can still go up even when overall average poverty goes down.