That's a sad story though getting a bit far afield from young kids taking public transit or otherwise traveling away from their homes. At 17 I was in college and taking urban transportation (and flights) all the time.

I’m also curious why you write “we in Phoenix are dealing with…”

I’ve noticed a trend of people attaching a sort of personal identification with headlines

Someone and their gang pulled a knife on me as a kid when I was riding the bus forty years ago in a university town, but that doesn’t make what they did normalized, it just makes an anecdote. As it happens, though, that is quite normalized in the U.S., especially if you’re not white.

A lot of U.S. residents inure themselves to random acts of violence because they either feel helpless to change the societal contexts of that violence and/or because admitting that violence would require confronting the benefits of power exploitation vs. the drawbacks of racism, sexism, bullying, and bystanderism. That swarm of boys abusing a girl to enforce societal mores that benefit them to her detriment is a trope from Pleasantville. This isn’t some new or unknown thing. This is a standard-issue United States Lynch Mob that’s been known about for a century.

I’ve been upset about this for thirty years, which is when I first discovered this. Welcome to the shameful desert of the real. Sad that it took y’all so long to see it; but now you have a chance to decide a way forward. Circle the wagons and raise sheltered, and therefore weakened, children? Teach every family about this threat all the way down to the youngest that kids understand danger? Crossing guards that ride the buses and have safety whistles and self-defense training? Lobby your city government to shift policing dollars to transit safety officers? Lobby your regional government to shift road maintenance dollars to gang violence de-escalation efforts?

As you can see, it’s difficult to find a way forward that feels appropriately vengeful upon ‘those that hurt our budding flower’ while also having a meaningful impact on the quality of the future. Most regions would just try to defund bus service, which fucks over everyone except wealthy adults on time scales longer than ten years or so, because at least that ‘feels’ like an effective response.

Good luck.

Multiple people died on the same stretch of road on the same afternoon that I drive on often about a month ago. One was just a teenager in a car that was following the law, it was the other car that was speeding.

I've seen lots of death on the roads around me.

But sure, it's the train that's unsafe.

This was of course the trains fault

It is the difference in culture. In big cities, Japan doesn’t tolerate public deviance. Police are visible in every block. They are very strict about weapons; you can’t bring a knife in public for no reason etc.

To his point - I would say, it's a bug factor BECAUSE on average their culture seems more safe. But it's not because it's monocultural. Bad "monoculture" is bad, good one is good, nothing complex there. Simplifying, but that's pretty much what is said

Diversity doesn't make places more dangerous (if i understand the stats). But humans are naturally tribal and fear those who look and act significantly different.

Yes. Russia is inarguably safer in terms of street crime than the USA.

Philadelphia in 2025 had a higher murder rate than Belfast during the height of a civil war.

https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_countries_result.jsp?co...

Crime in the USA is also extremely regional and local in pattern.

I grew up in a neighborhood that had a drug den next to the 7-11 that all the kids went to buy slurpees at.

The dealers didn't bother the kids, and the kids knew not to go into that yard.

There were plenty of street walkers on a particular stretch of streets. They weren't talking to anyone who wasn't looking to buy.

Of course I had the advantage of being a broke kid at the time, so I wasn't a mark for crime. I was just another neighborhood kid who was walking through. It was a working class neighborhood with a few sketchy parts. There was the occasional shooting or drive by, and property theft was common (every bike I had as a kid was stolen from me at some point), but it wasn't unsafe in regards to violence.

I almost impaled myself on a rebar pole while jumping my bike over hills at an abandoned construction site. That was the most dangerous thing that ever happened to me growing up there. (well aside from the time I almost died falling into a sink hole and managed to grab onto a nearby tree root and pull myself up in time, but that was in the middle of nearby woods, so not gonna blame that on societal problems!)

Humboldt County would like a word.