Sydney Conrad
Staff Writer

If you live in a seedy area and are considered poor you are a troublemaker and will never amount to anything.

This statement reflects the statistic that the world puts on rundown neighborhoods and its inhabitants. Yes, crime may be more prominent in proclaimed “ghettos,” and yes people there can be significantly worse-off, but this is not the truth.

All excuses aside, it is because these people have heard relentlessly and therefore conformed to the statistic that they are helpless. Being considered lower class and living in a troubled area does not make you who you are.

However, society today has developed into this way of thinking. We are breeding a generation subject to unstable environments and, in turn, unstable minds.

This issue was brought to my attention on Sept. 23. On this day an overwhelming amount of violent crime took place in a mere six hours, in about a 100-mile radius. A high school underwent lockdown due to an armed threat; a shooting occurred in the city; a vehicle crashed through the wall of an apartment, pinning two people underneath it.

Lakewood, and Washington in general, has fallen subject to an absurd crime rate, and its people to the common statistic.

A report composed of Lakewood Crime Rates demonstrates my point.

Per 100,000 people in Lakewood, a whopping 4,242 crimes in total were committed. Out of those, 512 were classified as violent crimes and 3,730 were property crimes. This rate is just short of the national average at 4,479.

Lakewood is a crater for crime these days, and it seems as if nothing, and no one, is trying to fix it.

Whether it is due to the statistic I have described, or some greater inexplicable reason, our society should recognize this and do everything we can to lean away from trouble and fix our community.