City Demographics and Crime Profile

City Demographics and Crime Profile

Jordan Reaves, Joshua Phillips, Kenneth Clary, Krystal Banks, Gheshona Judge-Williams

AJS/514

July 11, 2016

Avenella Dalesio

City Demographics and Crime Profile

Poverty, education, cultural diversity, zoning issues and crime are things at every state in America currently faces. These issues that we are faced with daily causes in many areas property values to go down, cost of living increases and high unemployment rates. The City of Compton is a densely urban area located in California and is currently an extremely ethnically diverse city.  Originally known for being historically Black Compton currently consists of majority Latino. The cost of living in Compton is rated as one of the highest in the nation.  The Neighborhood Scout (2016) website stated, “Compton is a blue-collar town, with 36.13% of people working in blue-collar occupations, while the average in America is just 27.7%”. Jobs in Compton are limited for blue collar workers; therefore many residents have to travel outside of the city on an average 30 minutes away to work.

Compton a city that is known by many for the many rappers that started their careers singing about the hard life that they lived, gun violence, killings, corruption and gangs, is also known for having the most amount of killers in the minority groups.  That’s higher than the counties and 4 percentages higher than that of the nearby communities of Lynwood, east Compton and north downtown Long Beach” (Bartholomew, 2015). There were over 302 people murdered in Compton between 2000 and 2010. There are still 117 of those murders that are still unsolved. “There is a culture of violence from generation to generation, in which they’re accustomed to live that way. It’s a cycle” (Bartholomew, 2015).

      Characterization of the City of Compton in terms of Social and Intellectual Contexts

The City of Compton, California is located in the southernmost part of Los Angeles County. Compton is amongst the older cities in the United States. The most recent 2016 U. S. Census reports that the city has a population estimated at about 98,000 residents. The demographics of the city in terms of race ratio proportions is about (33%) Blacks, (65%) Hispanic and Latinos, (26%) Whites and other races less than (1%) individually.  The City of Compton consists of a lower working class to middle class community in which the average age of its residence is 25 years old (2015 data). Since the City was first established in May of 1888 it has faced several challenges.

The city consisted of rich soil, and farm land which influenced promising opportunities for growth of the community and its residence. The many failures concerning its social and intellectual issues created complex problems over the century. Some influential leaders of the City of Compton have previously attempted to strategize methods that would address the many challenges to make improvements. Compton’s current mayor, Aja Brown, was interviewed by CNN news on August 3, 2015 in which she was questioned concerning the city’s progress. Mayor Aja Brown characterized her city in terms of social and intellectual issues as being one of the poorest, gang ridden cities in the nation (Brown 2015).