As a kid, I spent a lot of time in the old Nichols Library next to Central Park. I would go there on my bike, prop the bike against an elm tree, which were plentiful then, and read in one of the second-floor carrels. Even though it was a nice bike that my father bought at Sears — not a piece of junk that nobody would ever want to steal — it never once occurred to me to lock the bike up.
One summer, when we were living in our house as we were building it, something they sadly don’t let you do any more, we didn’t even have a front door. We just hung an old Army blanket over the hole, and the only thief that ever came through it was our neighbor’s black cocker spaniel named Smokey.
Admittedly, the Chicago South Side neighborhood in which I was born, and to which I often returned, wasn’t the shooting gallery it is today, but it was bad enough to make the contrast between there and here a pleasant surprise. There was essentially no crime here.
And there apparently still isn’t today. A financial news and opinion corporation named 24/7 Wall Street has just rated the 10 safest cities in the United States with populations over 100,000. Naperville came in No. 4, with no murders in 2013 and only 73 violent crimes per 100,000 people.
As a financial company, 24/7 Wall Street cited Naperville’s 4.4 percent poverty rate, which was the lowest in the nation; its 97.8 percent rate of people with at least a high school diploma, the nation’s highest; and its median household income, which was the nation’s second highest.
More Top Picks Cold Frames
The company is fond of an Urban Institute quote that says that reducing crime “is about economic policy, it’s not about crime policy. The idea is that if you make a city more economically vibrant, you attract people to that city who bring with them resources to try and make that city better.”
Well, that’s true to some extent, I suppose. It’s clear that where there are no jobs, families fall apart and gangs take their place. It’s certainly true that poverty breeds violence and self abuse. And of course, everybody knows that, where there is desperation, there are always desperados.
But some of our richest people are also some of our biggest liars and most ruthless crooks, people who seem to have no regard for anyone but themselves, so there must be a little more to it. A low poverty rate is swell, unless you get there by forcing out of town anyone who becomes ill, falls on hard times or gets old.
Certainly, affluence helps, but it’s not enough. You need a sense of community and involvement. Young people who believe that their neighbors care about them won’t vandalize the neighborhood. People who feel that they’re respected members of the community won’t drink too much and get into fistfights.
Crimes are committed by those who feel alienated, those who feel they’re on the outside. Where Naperville seems to have done a good job is in keeping the number of those folks to a minimum. The better we do that job in the future the less crime we’ll have. It’s not just about enforcing the law — something the police do a little too strictly, I think. In a truly safe town, the police don’t enforce the law, the people do.
The safest town in Illinois is Griggsville with a population of 1,200. I think it’s amazing that we’re almost as safe as they are, even though we’re more than a hundred times larger. And frankly I hope we can make our town even safer in the future because I really hate having to lock up my bike.