Thoughts on crime in the USA

We talk a lot about violent crime here in Buenos Aires; and I think rightly so. Problems with the economy are increasing everyday and so are crime statistics. I was thinking about crime back at home (the USA) after reading a post on a forum here about McDonalds in shady areas. And I wanted to share some of my thoughts about life for me back at home.

Bob Dylan wrote a song on his first album entitled "Talkin' New York" in which he wrote the following line as an observation of the crime there:

A lot of people don't have much food on their table,
But they got a lot of forks n' knives, and they gotta cut somethin'.

I traveled for nearly ten years as project manager for Autozone, a "do-it-yourself" autoparts store. And guess where we put them all: in the worst part of the city. I have worked in South Central L.A., Harlem, Watts, on 8-mile in Detroit, etc.

In parts of Los Angeles you cannot go inside any of the fast food restaurants, convenience stores or service stations. They have armed guards on the premises and they hand you your food, etc. using either a bullet-proof glass turnstyle or something like a bank drawer.

In inner-city Chicago, you can go inside most restaurants and fast food places but they have bullet proof glass seperating the employees from the customers and a similar turnstyle.

In inner-city Detroit the McDonalds have razor wire around them and armed guards on the premise that time your visit there to about ten minutes and then throw you out.

There are other parts of the country that are similar, but these three cities seem the worst from my experience.

I have an interesting footnote to the above. I mentioned working for Autozone as a project manager. Like many companies, Autozone has a color scheme for their employees' uniforms. I worked out of the corporate office and wore white shirts to denote management, blue shirts for new store development, and black shirts for acquisitions and remodels.

In the regular Autozone stores the management also wore white and the hourly employees wore red shirts with black trim.

Well, in South Central L.A., as many of you know, there are major issues with street gangs and they also had colors: blue or black (or a combination of the two) for crips, red for bloods, etc.

So Autozone had to create an alternative scheme for their hourly store employees and they ended up with the same uniforms but in orange. And as a matter of corporate policy, I never wore my blue or black shirts. And believe it or not, they adopted this policy not as an overreaction to fear but as the direct result of so many employees being shot or killed while on the way to work.

I do not know if there is a point to this story, however it is something to consider when contrasting life in the States to life down here.

"Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will." Mahatma Gandhi