Riverside is geen buurt, maar een officiële stad. Doch oostelijk van LA, en met relatief veel etnische minderheden zal het niet de beste buurt zijn. Dat is over het algemeen een vuistregel om aan te houden. Doch, niet de beste buurt wil niet zeggen dat het een slechte buurt is. (ik weet het, ik gebruik nu ook de term buurt) Je moet dit meer lezen als "het is geen Beverly Hills". Wikipedia zegt
dit erover:
The three most crime-prone areas are the Casa Blanca, Eastside, and Arlanza neighborhoods. Casa Blanca started around the late 1920s to early 1930s, but became troublesome around the 1950s and still to this day are known to be very violent.
Data collected by Project Bridge, an anti-gang program under the City of Riverside’s Park and Recreation Department, shows that the city of Riverside has experienced an increase in gang membership and gang activity since the early 1990s. In 1991, Riverside had approximately 82 gangs with 4,500 active gang members. More recent estimates indicate there are 86 gangs with 8,000 members. Reportedly 3,000 of these members are juveniles, while 10 of these gangs are primarily minors. The juvenile crime rates did drop dramatically between 1994 and 1997 for these areas. However, juvenile crime rates have exhibited a gradual and steady rise since 1998. In 2000, Casa Blanca, Arlanza and Eastside had crime rates of approximately 40, 18, and 30 per 1000 youths, respectively. Of these three areas, the Eastside’s problems are compounded by the highest unemployment rate in the City, 65.1%[citation needed] . The neighborhood also has the lowest educational attainment in the City, with 82%[citation needed] of the population having less than a 4th grade education. Project Bridge has provided comprehensive services to at-risk and gang-involved youth between the ages of 4 and 22 and their families in for over a decade. Since 1995, the program has served over 500 gang-involved youth with recent enrollment nearing 500 participants. Almost 50 percent of participant enrollment is generated from the Eastside, mostly from the areas around the Eastside Apartments.[48]
Riverside's Comprehensive Community-Wide Approach to Gang Prevention, Intervention, and Suppression project is focused on two of the high gang-crime neighborhoods, Casa Blanca and Eastside. In these neighborhoods, there are 21 gangs with approximately 3,230 members. The project targets more than 150 gang-involved and high-risk youth. Oversight of the project is handled by a committee consisting of local agencies and organizations, including the Riverside County Juvenile Court, the Riverside County District Attorney's Office, the Riverside and Alvord Unified School Districts, the Youth Service Center, and other agency and community leaders.[49]
Like much of the country, Riverside's crime rate has been steadily dropping since reaching all-time high in the 1970s[citation needed] though the past two years has seen a dramatic 10 percent increase in the overall violent crime rate (1,954 crimes in 2005 vs. 1,777 in 2004.) According to the FBI crime index there were 1,922 violent crimes along with 11,059 property crimes in 2008.[50] In the city of Riverside, 15 homicides occurred in 2009, down from 20 in 2008, its highest total since 2003 when there were 24. All but three cases resulted in arrests.[51] In the past 10 years Riverside has averaged about 20 homicides a year, its highest being in 1999 when there were 31 homicides.[52]
Besef je tevens dat deze buurt een stad is met meer inwoners dan Utrecht. Veiligheid hangt vaak af van waar je precies bent.
