Safety in the Bay Area

by Olivia, Jackie P. and Henry

There are a lot of place around the world that have different beliefs and thoughts about whether or not they think their community is safe. When we visited Walnut Creek, the Castro, Alameda, Chinatown, Fruitvale, Lakeshore, Old Oakland and Rockridge.

After we visited different places, we compared the different places about what people thought about the police presence. Most of them had said that they feel that their community is safe because they see a lot of police patrolling around; they live by the police station. Other places said that their community was safe because their police does a good job on taking care of it. They feel that the residents there are willing to help out and take care of their community.

The only community that we saw that had the most trouble with the police presence was Fruitvale because people there thought that they needed more cops in their community. So from what we noticed about the different communities we visited, we say that most of the people that feel safe in their community feel that way because they like their neighbors and how their police take care of it.

For those that do not feel safe it may be for different reasons, like the lack of not having cops around were they live. When you think about the safety of a community, the people that are actually part of that community and visit that community impact your perspective. After visiting the eight different communities we noticed that depending on who was surrounding us determined whether we felt safe or not. Places like Alameda, Rockridge, Walnut Creek, Old Oakland, and Lakeshore made us feel safer because there were places that were definitely family-oriented. You could see a lot of parents walking around with their kids with strollers. When we see families like that we could only imagine that the neighborhood is safe enough to have their children there.

Also the presence of business people make you feel like the neighborhood is pretty professional and safe. If you have business people walking around with business suits and expensive cars you can imagine that they feel comfortable and safe around there. In neighborhoods like Lakeshore, Alameda, Walnut Creek and Rockridge we saw a lot of business people going out to lunch. In neighborhoods like Fruitvale, Chinatown and the Castro, it wasn’t often that you would see business people in suits or a lot of families just talking a walk. These seem like more busy neighborhoods. Chinatown has mostly Asians that are always on-the-go walking in and out of the shops. Castro is the gay capital of the world so the environment there is just different all together, although there were some parents and kids around. Fruitvale is just a lot more Hispanic-oriented with a lot of young teens around there throughout the day.

When we went to all the different cities, we saw homeless people in Walnut Creek, Rockridge, the Castro, Alameda, old Oakland, and Lakeshore. We saw more homeless people in Fruitvale and Rockridge than the other places. We think because its Oakland. But we know that there are a lot of homeless people in Berkeley, too. We think the reason why they are homeless is because they buy drugs and they get addicted to it and they start buying it more and more and they start losing there money and family and then they lose their homes.