This past week in San Francisco I had a chance to go to a baseball game when the Orioles were playing the Giants at AT&T Stadium. As you can see with the guy wearing the Machado shirt above there were a fair number of Oriole fans at the game. The problem was that orange and black are also the colors of the Giants so it made it a little harder to pick out the Oriole fans by just looking for orange shirts.
The Orioles were nice enough to pull the game out in the 8th inning and win.
What got me thinking about in writing this blog was what happened after the game. We walked back a mile and a half to my daughter's apartment at 11 pm and the streets were full of people.
Almost all the people we passed had not been to the game but were just out enjoying the city. Woman walking alone. So why couldn't this happen in Baltimore? We all know the answer is gangs and guns. San Francisco has some gangs but has one of the lowest rates of murders rates of any major city. When you watch the news in Baltimore it usually leads off with stories of how many people have been shot in the city. Even attending the fireworks on the Fourth of July in Baltimore can be unsafe according to this news report. Police commissioners come and go, new gun violence strategies are developed and yet nothing seems to be improved in bringing down the murder rate and Baltimore's reputation as a violent city. I don't have any easy answers to this situation but it would be nice to have a city with the vitality of San Francisco close by.
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3 comments:
We do. It's called Washington, DC.
I agree DC is probably a good example
Whoever wrote this post knows nothing about San Francisco. SF is more like DC. It has been gentrified. But how dangerous SF is depends greatly on the color of your skin. SF had the highest black murder rate in the entire country only a few years ago. The Mission district is torn apart by Latino gang violence. I grew up in the infamous Oceanview district in SF which was historically statistically just as violent and dangerous as anywhere in Baltimore city proper. All of this can be easily fact checked online. I suspect who wrote this post is white and from the suburbs because most violence in Baltimore city is drug related and has nothing to do with gangs.
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