We all know that suburbs are safer than cities....

Dragnet TV ad
Originally uploaded by rllayman

I was talking with Ken Firestone today and we discussed how television has portrayed the cities through family types and where people lived (Lucille Ball, Honeymooners, All in the Family, Jeffersons, Mary Tyler Moore Show, Cosby--sort of, I don't remember ever seeing the city in the show, Friends, Seinfeld) and the suburbs (Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet, Dick Van Dyke Show, Bewitched, Brady Bunch).

Then we got to talking about how there is no question that police/detective shows depict cities as a cesspool of crime.

• Naked City;
• Untouchables;
• Dragnet;
• Adam 12;
• Rookies;
• Hill Street Blues;
• Homicide;
• Cops/America's Most Wanted;
• NYPD Blue;
• Law and Order and all the spinoffs -- 17 years of mayhem in NYC;
• CSI/CSI: New York/CSI: Miami;
• The District;
• EZ Streets;
• Wire.

And there are likely many more I have missed. Plus, somehow we have to classify FBI, Hawaii 5-0, Mannix, and maybe Dog.

All show cities in a terrible light.

This is on my mind not just because of murder and crime in the suburbs, killing sprees usually in suburban high schools and other gathering places, and the rampant drug and alcohol abuse problems in the suburbs and rural areas (see the tv show "Intervention" as well as reports about drug production both of marijuana and meta-amphetamines) but because in my side consulting work, one of the concerns that the respective commercial districts face (one in a large center city in Pennsylvania, the other a traditional downtown in a southern state, in a county with under 100,000 residents) is a perception that these places are unsafe.

Given that DC has a murder rate of greater than 30/100,000 residents, and streets that are for the most part dirty as hell (the litter here in the non-business improvement districts is terrible), and these commercial districts are, by comparison, pristine and the amount of crime is minuscule, I find this almost laughable.

But the respective commercial district revitalization organizations still have to address the issue, and manage the perceptions of potential patrons.

I joke with my girlfriend when watching "CSI: Miami" about what an unsafe city Miami must be, plus, how could it be that all these white people are being killed, given the murder statistics in Miami-Dade county are skewed to African-American and Hispanic victims.