It was a jarring sight.
A Toyota sedan missing all four wheels. The disk-like rotors were fully exposed to the elements, as a small rock kept the rest of the chassis off the ground.
Some bad actors had stolen away with the tires and hubs in the dead of the night. An inner-city occurrence that was all too frequent.
Only this car wasn’t in the inner city. It was parallel parked along a tree lined street in a suburban neighborhood. My neighborhood.
Oh God, I mused as I passed the disabled vehicle. Am I safe here?
I thought back to a few nights earlier, when I’d taken an evening stroll on that same street. I don’t remember seeing the Toyota sedan parked there yet. But I don’t remember seeing much of anything at all.
You see, the streetlights were out in that area. The sidewalk was pitch black.
I wasn’t worried about criminals attacking at that moment. I was more concerned about tripping over a rogue tree branch or colliding with an aloof squirrel.
But now, I recognized the error of my ways.
I should have been more vigilant. I should have reported the extinguished streetlights – on that street and every other across the neighborhood. I should have been prepared to face down thugs on every corner.
Or maybe not.
The disabled car sat on that rock for a couple of weeks before it was towed away.
All the while, I scanned the neighborhood for other signs of mischief.
I started walking the neighborhood with a flashlight, protecting myself against a potential ambush. I perused postings on Ring and Nextdoor, looking for the patterns of local perpetrators. I pondered enrolling in a Concealed Carry course.
But trouble never came to my doorstep. Just like lightning, it only struck once.
This left me in a strange purgatory.
My neighborhood had proven to be about as safe after the wheel theft as it was before it. But that incident was too brazen to ignore. It had skewed my judgment.
No matter what the numbers stated, I could never truly feel safe there again.
Wrong place, wrong time.
It’s the predominant explanation for tragedy.
We do not tend to court misfortune. Yet, it sometimes finds us anyway — in the most random fashion possible.
There’s no way to truly rationalize these brutal occurrences. Wrong place, wrong time is all we have for an explanation.
But there’s a hidden implication in this statement. Namely, an acknowledgement that a right place and a right time exist somewhere else.
The quest for that somewhere else has served as our societal North Star for generations.
It has led us from colonial encampments to the wild frontier. It has led us back to the cities and then out to the suburbs. It has spurred innovation and infrastructure, but also White Flight and gentrification.
Yes, the legacy of the quest for somewhere else is a complicated one. For the world is not as straightforward as we’d like it to be. And the green grass on the other side of the fence is sure to turn brown once we trample all over it.
Our quest for utopia is a recipe for disaster. And yet, we commit ourselves to baking the cake.
We condemn the Southside, the South Bronx, and South Central. We exalt the fancy enclaves with the elite public schools and the well-heeled police forces.
We wrap ourselves in the illusion of safety. And when the veneer is stripped away, we feel the full weight of the betrayal. Just as I did when I saw the wheel-less Toyota sedan a mere 500 feet from where I lay my head at night.
It’s an insidious pattern. And we’re to blame for it.
Our society is obsessed with rankings.
We’re always eager to see how the football team we root for, the college we attended, or the price we paid for gasoline compares to the other options out there.
Fortunately, there are several organizations out there to satiate our list-mania. One of them is WalletHub.
The personal finance company is best known for its credit card recommendation tools. But it also publishes rankings of the safest cities in America.
WalletHub’s most recent annual edition released a few weeks before I sat down to write this article. So, naturally, I gave it a thorough read.
The first few cities didn’t lead to any raised eyebrow. They were in predominantly rural states that featured low populations.
But when I saw the city ranked #6 on the list, I gasped.
That city was Yonkers, New York.
While I’ve been a Texan for my entire adult life, I spent my childhood in Yonkers. I grew up in a decently-sized house with a front yard and a backyard — luxuries most residents of nearby New York City did not have.
The surrounding neighborhood was hilly, shaded by tall trees that dumped bushels of leaves every fall. The streets were quiet. The neighbors were too.
It had all the appearances of a nice place. But appearances can be deceiving.
When I was just 6 years old, someone stole my father’s car from right in front of our house. A few years later, a nearby home was burglarized. Shortly after that, someone drove across the front lawn of our across-the-street neighbor before plowing into a retaining wall.
It was all more than a bit unsetting.
I wanted to believe that my home was safe. That I didn’t have to worry when I closed my eyes at night.
But each time the blue police lights lit up our street, I doubted that premise. And each time my father installed an alarm system or trimmed the hedges a little lower, uncertainty proliferated.
I moved away from Yonkers many years ago. And my parents eventually sold my childhood home.
Several months after they left the city, a man in a parked car shot a Yonkers police officer approaching his vehicle. The officer’s partner returned fire, leading to an extended shootout. Terrified onlookers told news reporters that it felt like the wild west.
The whole incident took place on the same block where I grew up. If I were still there, I could have watched it unfold from my childhood bedroom.
Yet, despite that shooting and all the criminal activity I witnessed before it, Yonkers found its validation. Despite its star-crossed legacy as the site of the fire that killed Malcolm X’s widow, the arrest of the Son of Sam killer, and the early misdeeds of the rapper DMX, Yonkers was ultimately lauded as a beacon of safety.
What gives?
Signal and noise.
It’s the central paradox of statistics.
As we accumulate data, we yearn to find meaning in its patterns. But some of those associations ultimately don’t hold water. They’re the noise that the proven conclusions — the signal — must compete with.
The officer-involved shooting near my childhood home is a prime example of this. It spooked the neighborhood, no doubt. But it also was the first time in 30 years that a Yonkers Police Officer was shot in the line of duty.
In the grand scheme of things, it was not signal. It was noise.
The prior criminal incidents I witnessed on that block also fell into the noise column. While each was unnerving, they took place far too infrequently to cause real concern.
My childhood neighborhood, it seems, has long been a predominantly safe place. It just wasn’t perfectly safe.
The same can be said about my current neighborhood. And many others across our nation.
It’s that variance that gets me — that gets many of us.
Safety is such an existential need that we seize upon any sign of imperfection. One lapse is too many, and two is catastrophic.
But this trend is not feasible or productive. It leads us to overestimate bad outcomes and succumb to paranoia. It fosters tragic misconceptions of the places we frequent, and the people we share those places with.
We need to let go of those delusions, and to choose a more sustainable path instead. We need to recognize the risk of a wheel theft or a crash into a nearby retaining wall for what it is – low, not zero – and calibrate our responses accordingly. We need to stop casting out the good with the bad.
This will be an uncomfortable shift for many of us. Myself included.
But it’s a necessary one.
We will never find a true sense of security without making peace with our surroundings.
It’s starts with us. Let’s get to it.