I'd like to say up front that I would prefer that this thread doesn't become a "my neighborhood is better than your neighborhood" debate.

The Catholic Highschool in my neighborhood just has 2 people stabbed a few weeks ago. And, there was a gangstyle execution at the local grocery store.

I would like to re-locate my family to a safter neighborhood. How should I make this determination?

I don't want to upgrade my house, at great expense just to find out that the local highschool has just as many scumbags in it.

Any recomendations? I found some demographics for each neighborhood in Calgary, should I racial profile a neighborhood and discriminate against specific ethnic groups? low income?

what is it that makes a neighborhood safer for my kids?

If you live in Calgary you know that you have to stay out of the northeast districts if you want to keep away from the worst of the crime. It's been like that for decades and probably won't change any time soon.

As far as highschools are concerned I wouldn't want to be in any area that is in close proximity to any of them regardless of district. Ditto for stripmalls. Ditto for any C-Train platform. It's just the way it is but such sites will always attract the dirtbags.

Here's a link to the Calgary Police stats that you will hopefully find useful:

http://www.calgarypolice.ca/news/stats_community.html

All the figures are for 2006. I monitor it on a regular basis and for some reason they seem to be slower than usual in updating it for the accumulated 2007 stats.

What part of town do you live in?. My family lives in all 4 corners of the city, I grew up on the east side which has changed dramatically since the 70's.

As a mom - I'd speak to the high school counselors or administrators.

Find out what the dynamics of their student populations are and which neighbourhoods are within their zones. Then investigate those neighbourhoods.
Would narrow the search and possibly give you a clearer picture, depending what you're looking for, or looking to avoid.

Just a thought.

thanks, my neighborhood is in the NE. it has a crime rate of 4 and 10 which is just as good as many SW neighborhoods,like woodbine, deerrun, canyon meadows, etc.
yet my neighboring communities are twice as bad, which is probably a good indicator of what I can expect after the houses on my street have flipped ownership a few times.


just for comparison sakes, Forest Lawn is 68 and 5xx ( don't challenge me on the exact figures, I'm not making an effort to be acurate.) So I'm not that bad.

I noticed place like Parkland are awesome! but Parkland is too small of a community to support its own highschool, so my kids might be at risk while at school even though we go through a great expense of buying in a good neighbor hood.

BTW, I was thinking that the catholic schools system is too large to be considered any safer that a public school.

If I decided to be mean to my son, maybe he should be sent to a 7th day adventist school

The NE has twice the imigrant percentage compared to the city average. And the imigrants are mostly indian/asain.

Where as Queensland has half the imigrant percentage compared to the city average and most of the imigrants are European.

Personally, I've never consider a large east indian family as a crime threat. All prejudice aside, I don't feel their kids are ruining the community. However, its a well established fact that the NE has other ethnic groups including asian gangs.

So, whats worse asian gangs, or the white trash? Who is more likely to hurt my son?

Personally I think that the white trash are worse than the immigrant kids. Just going by personal experience I've gotten fucked over more by white idiots in the last ten years than I ever did by any persons of colour. I'd say that most of the petty and violent crime is being committed by drug addicts who are white than by visible minorities. I'm not Joe Liberal and saying that the immigrants are saints, cynically-speaking of course, but at least the immigrant criminal types have the dedency to only victimize people in their own communities. They generally don't go on a city-wide rampage and victimize everyone the way the white trash like to do.

Sorry for the cynicism. I'm living next to three white jerkoffs in their early 20's who have wrecked my home for me. It's bad enough that I've had to phone the cops twice on them and had to go after the condo board to get them evicted. At this stage I'd rather live next door to an Asian or Muslim family any day of the week. At lease they'd go to bed at a normal hour, wouldn't throw their garbage, cigarette butts, and beer cans all over the place, and probably wouldn't make anywhere near as much noise.

Anyway we can get Ontario and the Maritimes to take all their bums and creeps back home before they wreck the whole province for us?

makes me wonder what has a more profound effect on a kid's safety...

Drug abusers and trash that you are having to live among(white trash), or extremely different and brutal people(ethnic gangs) that you could have a random encounter with. Maybe, I'm not even asking the correct questions, yet.

BTW, the 7th day adventist idea is sounding pretty good compared to my other options.