My own reply in the HuffPo thread:Excaliber wrote:A Washington D.C. news crew visited an area neighborhood identified as "sketchy" by SketchFactor, a new application that is designed to help people avoid troubled neighborhoods by accumulating crowdsourced data and data from public databases. Their goal was to prove it wasn't really a bad neighborhood at all.
That's not quite what they ended up proving. This article tells the tale.
The Huffington Post doesn't like the app at all (which may constitute a reverse recommendation of sorts) but the news crew's experience suggests that the app may be more credible than its wishful thinking critics would like folks to believe.
Denial = Enabling. I've lived in NYC, Los Angeles, and now the DFW metroplex. _______ happens, but it happens MORE in sketchy areas. People have some right to know if the area they are venturing into is less safe than the area they are leaving. Only an enabler would deny that fact. That said, I just looked at some of the "sketch reports" for my area (near DFW Airport), and they are hilarious:
"I killed someone."
"There was a ghost."
"Creepy older white man."
"A sketchy black van with spinners and dents all over it. A black man driving it as well as 3 other black men on the sofas in the back of it. They asked me if I wanted to [do something obscene]."
"I saw a black person."
"The black person saw me."
"The college students in this area are ungrateful and [...are...] [word meaning "crappy"] to anyone that doesn't get out of their way. Be sure to remind them that they haven't worked for anything they have. And that their parents will be dead soon."
I mean, c'mon people......you're so busy being worried about political correctness that it results in farcical contributions, negating what might otherwise be a useful app. It's not like white people have a lock on being worried about sketchiness. In fact, it's kind of racist to insist that such worries are the exclusive domain of whites. Sketchy is as sketchy does.