I can't speak to murders or other violent crime, but it was called the Loot Rail because of the prevalence of shoplifting after the line was opened into the suburbs.
It's documented somewhere, but I can't find it with a few minutes of searching. It's wildly racist and classist, but almost certainly true if you ignore "per capita" or other qualifiers.
Higher numbers of people in a location lead to more crimes occurring in that location, so "crime went up when the rail arrived" is almost a statistical certainty. It doesn't address the fact that crime may increase by 10% while the transit population goes up by 50%.
Even without a train line, I know of a dry suburban township that got a Walmart -- and its crime rate got much larger just because of all the people driving from out of town shopping at the Walmart.
What is the evidence that (1) this rise in crime rate occurred, and (2) was due to people conveniently combining their shopping trips with their crime trips?
(1) The crime rate increased -- like, Walmart-related crime was a big proportion of the crime rate. This was a community whose raunchiest establishment was an AMC theater.
(2) They weren't making "crime trips" -- they just came to shop at Walmart and crime happened. For example, shoplifting, on impulse. Some fights and such.
The point is, the crime caused by the train line may also partly be of this sort -- impulsive shoplifting, rather than deliberate shoplifting trips.
So the presence of a store lead to people shoplifting in said store? I suppose if the Wal-Mart were not there, the shoplifting wouldn't have happened. Perhaps we shouldn't have stores then.
Do you have any evidence of a crime increase aside from the existence of a store allowing people to shoplift from the store? I'm not asking for your perception here, because it has little to do with what the real crime rate is.
The shoplifting would have happened at other stores, in the townships where those people live -- other ones.
What do you mean evidence? I'm stating as an established fact that the township's crime rate increased. With people from out of town that were shopping at Walmart. The police keep track of this information.
You said the crime increased. It has in most places in the last few years, not just where there is Wal-Marts. It also fluctuates everywhere constantly. There was understandably an uptick of shoplifting at the Wal-Mart due to its existence, but how does it follow that that :
(1) The Wal-Mart caused an increase in total crime. Any place where people congregate will have more crime. The existence of the Wal-Mart may have displaced crime and shoplifting from elsewhere. The existence of the Wal-Mart means that crimes occur there, but that doesn't tell you anything one way or the other.
(2) If the crime was due to the Wal-Mart, it was mostly due to people coming in from out of the area. How many of the people caught were not from the area? How does this proportion differ from when the Wal-Mart wasn't there?
The claims you are making would be very hard to show for a hyper-local area from the rates of crime and the demographics of the perpetrators. It requires actual evidence, including a very large effect to offset the noisy small sample.
> Any place where people congregate will have more crime. The existence of the Wal-Mart may have displaced crime and shoplifting from elsewhere. The existence of the Wal-Mart means that crimes occur there,
OK
> but that doesn't tell you anything one way or the other.
The claim is that crime increased due to out-of-area people coming to a Wal-Mart. People congregate in a Wal-Marts. The proportion of in- vs out- of-area people may differ, but there are a lot of people there. This means crime, especially because it is a store that can be shoplifted from. Much of this crime was displaced from elsewhere, because those same people weren't elsewhere.
In other words, it does not follow this crime was due to out-of-area people, since the crime would have increased regardless.
The rest of this thread (including the parent comment you were replying to) seemed to be about city vs suburbia, so that’s how I interpreted that Wal-Mart story. I’m not very familiar with the suburbanisation process in North America - I’ve never lived there - but wasn’t it driven by the desire of avoiding higher crime rates by moving to less densely populated areas? If so, local suburbanites must have hated that new Wal-Mart precisely because it was a point of congregation. Your reasoning is centered around “in vs out-of-area people” but the way I read it is just “not many people around vs lots of people around”.
The Walmart's existence as a crime nexus was because it attracted trashy people from other neighborhoods, not because it was a congregation point. The same problem didn't occur at previous superstores, or high school football games, or the community college.
