Three of the cities I have lived in, including the current city, have at various points, while I lived in them, been top 10 for violence. I currently live in a top 5 in fact.

Violence is the backdrop and has always 'been there' in some shape. I grew up in Los Angeles and, both of my parents being LAPD officers, the issue of violence and the results of violence shaped much of how we lived in and with the city. My father worked at Rampart station during the infamous 'Rampart Scandal', was in LA for the Watts Riots as a kid, as an LAPD officer for the King Riots. I was a kid for the King Riots, and spent that time watching the news and waiting for my dad to call to tell us he was OK, because he couldn't come home for the duration, he was sleeping at the station barracks.

A domestic violence incident resulted in my father taking another man's life, in order to keep that man from killing his wife and children. The man had opened fire on my father and his partner, and my father returned fire and the man died there, in front of his wife and children. My father knows he did the right thing, but the event still haunts him decades later.

I have lost friends to violence, and nearly lost friends to violence. The culture of violence has left many of my friends with rap sheets, both sealed when they turned 18, and continuing in to adulthood. I have friends who were victims of random acts of violence, from the simply mugging, to rape and random shootings. More than one of my friends has been a gunshot victim, in the comission of a crime they were not a perpetrator or direct victim of. One was shot three times by an unknown assailant, it was random fire that happened to find her as she walked home.

I have both been protected by and put open by the actions of police. There are times when their presence saved me from a bad situation, there was also a time when I was held, point blank, by a drunken off duty officer for a minor misdemeanor, while he assaulted me verbally with words and physically with spit and the business end of his pistol. Police are both a positive and negative part of our violence issues in America, I have no problem admitting that our current police cultures are causing crime in as much as they are preventing or solving it. I do not think every officer is bad, or that police as a principle are something to despise. I quite like them, and like any other human, I try and treat them like people until they give me reason to do otherwise. As with a previously mentioned incident, this has not always gone well for me with people, be they LEOs or otherwise.

I have been randomly assaulted, I have been robbed, I have been involved in fights by strangers, I have witnessed violent acts carried out by strangers, I have seen these acts reach fatal escalation. I have taken occasion to carry weapons since I was a teenager, and continue to take those occasions all these years later. I have never used these weapons, I have never drawn these weapons visibly on another person, because I have thankfully yet to enter a situation where I felt there was no other choice but to involve a weapon beyond my poor choice of words, my fists, or my feet. I would probably be in better health and sounder finances if I had taken occasion to threaten with weapon instead of be a punching bag - but I believe 'excessive force' is as much a civilian issue as it is a law enforcement issue, and don't want to participate in that statistic.

I know few people who cannot give you a name, a place, or a date when someone they knew, or something they saw, ended in a fatally violent act.

I still believe that pound for pound, this is one of the best places to live on earth, and that I am a lunatic for wanting to leave this country for other opportunities in measurably more dangerous places. If my children should decide to return to the states after we have left, I will gladly encourage them to do so.