Michoacán, 2nd Lowest Crime Rate State Per Capita

I was reading the Michoacan.Net posts digest this morning to see this low crime rate report. Michoacan.Net is a Yahoogroup site and the most active message board in our area and one I recommend to anyone interested in our local goings-on. As it is a subscriber site I will not attribute the report to a particular author for the sake of their privacy, but here is their blurb:

Quote :

"The News" is an English-language newspaper from Mexico City. Â Let me quote from an article about crime published on Thursday, the 22nd. "The survey, which was conducted by the National Statistics, Geography, and Information Institute [Inegi] notes that the states with the least rates of crime victims for every 100,000 people are Chiapas, with 12,856 people {victims}, Michoacan with 14,931, Oaxaca with 16,262...." We're #2 in order of safety, not danger!

There is no link to an article and I do not know if the cited publication has an online presence but I will look for that Inegi report to see if I can make these statistics more substantial.

This would go along with my personal feelings of safety and security based on my own perceptions and reports I hear from all around. Looks like perhaps Dawg has found the safest place to be there in Chiapas. We're right behind you, Dawg.

Statistics are a report on what has happened, not what might happen. Statistics notoriously can be bent, warped and spun to provide a propaganda message. People use whatever they wish to support their personal state of reality. To each their own.

What happens to us as individuals, or doesn't happen, is more valid than statistics, especially those issued by a government agency.

I know the fellow who posted the message, and he is a true and sincere gentleman. But I can't get the quote from Mark Twain out of my head:
"There are lies, damned lies and statistics."

As I suggested on Dawg's thread it may have more to do with less crimes being reported to the police, more crimes going unreported than in other places. Concerning the bottom three cited, Oaxaca, Michoacán, and Chiapas, that would not surprise me. Still, I have a general feeling of relative safety here. It is nice to have some seemingly solid and reliable report that would support that general feeling.

There is a sort of homespun atmosphere here of general caring and concern I sense between my neighbors in my long-time colonia that I had not sensed in California for a number of decades. That was not felt so much while living in the centro where it was more a sense of anonymity as one could expect in a more urbanized environment.

What I don't feel is a general "predatory" vibe. Though I don't at all dismiss the existence of such predators I don't have the overall sense of a lot of desperation. These are all "feelings" I am expressing here but they are senses we must have to navigate the jungle.

Any of us could fall victim to such predators that come lurching out at us, granted, but to keep us from living in a sense of constant fear that would also cloud our self-protective instincts, then we must feel reasonably comfortable in our environment. I feel reasonably comfortable here. What more assurrance can we reasonably expect? In more hostile environments those predators are less stealthy and lurk more openly. In the US, California, in more recent years I felt a growing sense of desperation. Less so here. Not all of Mexico feels quite as comfortable to me.