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I think there are a lot of factors that go into a persons environment that influence something like murder rates.

Also, depending on what you consider a violent crime, lack of reporting / local police department's doing something about the report can very well have skew crime rates in certain areas.

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Agreed, I don't think those neighborhoods just happen to have a bunch of violent people, but I keep seeing people make the naive agument that the difference in crime rate for those areas is caused by police presence. I remember after the protests in Baltimore that the police stopped doing as much proactive policing, and people who lived in the bad neighborhoods were complaining that the police weren't doing enough to prevent crime in their neighborhoods. There are underlying social issues that need to be dealt with that won't be fixed by removing police.

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