People have been killed in the Iron Triangle of Richmond to steal designer tennis shoes. I had one of my warehouse assistants shot dead just for his cell phone right across the street from the Junior College outside the Iron Triangle. Another assistant was nearly beaten to death for wearing the wrong color T-shirt, and his friend had his throat slit. Hunter's Point in SF is worse, or certainly was. Most SF residents are smart enough not to go there. I guess one could live there if they had bullet-proof siding. Same goes for the International Blvd section of Oakland, where the statistical rate of being killed is higher than in Baghdad. I won't drive through that neighborhood even in broad daylight.
I have one friend, a successful artist in fact, who lived on a street which was the territory boundary between rival Oakland and Berkeley drug gangs, who had a number of his canvas oil paintings ruined by the automatic weapons fire going through his own walls in their attempt to kill his neighbor. That was back when the Berkeley heroin trade was controlled by a group of doctors who acquired medical heroin from Canada and cut it for street use, while the kingpin of the Oakland heroin trade was its Mayor at that time, and of course, lived in the nicest section of town, and was himself an ideal neighbor with never a thug around. A serious latino gang kingpin lived now far from me in a nice house with flower boxes, with his daughters in uppity private schools, and never a problem with neighbors. Only their low-level thugs are stupid enough to drive around looking tough in bad neighborhoods, tempting other gangs to retaliate.
