Compton, California, Has Dubious Record of Fourth Most Dangerous City in America

If we may believe the figures cited as the result of the 2007 study, Compton, California ranks fourth amongst the most dangerous 25 cities in the United States. However, digging a bit deeper you will find out that among the 126 cities surveyed with population numbers ranging from 75,000 to 99,999, Compton is actually the most dangerous city! Lest you believe that this is a fluke, an aberrant measurement, and perhaps not reflective of the entirety that makes up what is known as the city of Compton, think again! As compared with last year's figures, Compton is the city with the largest decline!

The numbers were compiled by Morgan Quitno Press which has since been sold to CQ Press. As such, this formerly Kansas based research company has focused on health care and crime rankings but also releases figures with respect to educational achievements.

Compton, California is euphemistically known as the Hub, and one would think that the presence of an equestrian training facility as well as the Major League Baseball Academy would actually attract less criminal elements. Sadly, the violence and the crime have been so pervasive in Compton as to have become legendary. Consider the fact that gansta rap groups as early as 1988 sang about the violence. N.W.A. immortalized the gang fights, drug culture, and animosity against the police in the album entitled Straight Outta Compton.

Not much has changed almost 20 years later, and the gang wars and gang killings still cause Compton to top the charts with respect to being a virulently violent city where innocent bystander or not, you run the risk of becoming a casualty of the gang wars. Yet the last three years in particular have found a resurgence of gang strife, this time perpetrated by gangs of different ethnicities that are seeking to control not only the turf but also the drug traffic into surrounding neighborhoods.

Yet while gangs and the resorting drug trade are a symptom of the problem, those with their thoughts firmly rooted in economics believe the problems arose as the number of tax payers declined. In the early 1970s an influx of African American home owners sent bigoted Caucasian Americans fleeing the neighborhoods of Compton. Right, wrong, or indifferent, the fact that this loss wreaked havoc with the tax revenue the city would enjoy cannot be denied. When those African Americans who perhaps were not able to afford homes but still wanted to live in nicer neighborhoods began to flock to Compton and virtually overnight apartment buildings sprang up, many of the African American homeowners, and with them the remaining hopes of Compton's tax base, left and moved on. Thus, the city soon turned into a hotbed for poverty, government assisted housing, and all the ills and problems that extreme poverty brings with it. The latest influx of new residents is Latino, and thus racial strife and out and out gang wars are the latest order of business.

Of course, the governmental corruption and unwillingness on the part of Compton residents to work with the police department, which struggles with under funding and is consistently blamed for every unsolved crime, does not help matters; instead, it leads to platitudes, frequently so odd that those whose sons and daughters are dying on the front lines of this war have a hard time relating to them.

Yet even as Compton is officially defined by its mayor's vision to become a "great place to live, work, and raise a family", those in the know question the ability of the current trend to bring more jobs to the city to alleviate the violent trend - to little avail. After all, many of them also have no comprehensive silver bullet with which to eradicate gang warfare, racial tensions, a drug culture, and all the byproducts of poverty that have haunted this city for going on two generations. Sure, a combination of faith based initiatives, civil rights intervention, multicultural sensitivity training, a heavy influx of law enforcement, and of course the fiscal improvements that once again will bring an alternative to poverty to the city may have a positive effect, yet for as long as members of different ethnicities refuse to acknowledge their own racism, talks between civil authorities and spiritual authorities must be conducted in clandestine meetings lest some overly zealous watchdog group will cry foul and cite the separation of church and state as their battle cry, law enforcement is seen as the enemy, civil rights leaders are more attracted to media heavy events, and commercial successes seem to benefit a select few rather than the citizens as a whole, not much will change.