in multiple area neighborhoods throughout the city. By and large, the majority of the crime was limited to those specific areas with some overlap into nearby neighborhoods.

We didn't let our kids outside of our small, fenced in yard and even there, our German Shepherd guard dog was always with them and I was either out there too or at tge kitchen window cooking where I could see them at all times. We could see drug deals going down on our street and knew where multiple drug dens were near our house.

We couldn't leave ANYTHING out front without it being immediately stolen, even rubbish bags with actual rubbish a/o garbage.

Cars were broken into so regularly that police advised leaving them unlocked with absolutely nothing of value inside so thieves wouldn't break the car windows. Some of those thieves were grammar school children!

One Thanksgiving, we were delayed getting to my folks house because of a fatal shooting a half mile away on our street between 2 of the 4 gangs that lived in close quarters within 2 square miles of us. One Christmas morning, an entire family that lived 3 doors down were murdered in their beds, including a 10 year old playmate of our kids. There were drive-by shootings regularly on our block so I was terrified of letting our kids out of my sight. Multiple abandoned and drug houses were burnt down due to explosions cooking drugs for distribution. Several within a mile of our house.

I grew up in a neighboring town with minimal crime so was simply not prepared for that. I hated it there! I was always armed with a small 38 caliber revolver and pepper spray. Our grammar and middle school children had pepper spray with them in school.

Yet other neighborhoods and sections of the city were idyllic and terrific places to live. If you try to tell them that the city has a high crime rate (at least back in the 90s, now with the gangs taken care of, the city is relatively safe again overall), they'd scoff in disbelief because they didn't see it there. But WE saw it daily.

Ours WAS very safe when we bought the house, prior to the black, Puerto Rican, and Asian gangs moving in on the white drug dealers who'd plagued the previously French Canadian neighborhood and causing so many of them to move out.

Even living in Boston for a couple of years after leaving my small town, it wasn't anywhere near that bad. You'd expect a major city with gangs to be riddled with crime, but it wasn't anything like Fitchburg was where we lived.

((Now you know why we finally moved to rural NH where crime is all but nonexistent beyond someone taking veggies from an unmanned veggie stand employing the honor system of payment. That is a "big crime". LOL))

My point in telling this story is that every big and even small city has crime ridden neighborhoods JUST LIKE SPRINGFIELD, MO but also many neighborhoods like yours where crime is far less visible and active.

IOW, Chicago and NYC and other Blue cities are just like Springfield have their problems. It is not fair of you to condemn certain cities as sh*tholes of crime but somehow exclude your own city because it is not ALL bad. Neither are they!