Last summer, The L sent one of our newest interns to the Atlantic Center to buy chairs. He was promptly jumped outside the shopping mall and relieved of $35, as well as the company credit card. Perhaps it was a harbinger of things to come: the Post reports this morning that the area has become a hotbed of crime.
Just before the New Year, a woman shopping at the Burlington Coat Factory lost her purse. Then, last week, two thieves took a teenager’s cell phone outside the Atlantic Terminal Mall. A few days later, a teenager’s jaw was broken by five attackers inside Best Buy. The next day, a Target employee was arrested for stealing thousands of dollars worth of giftcards. The same day, a new mother’s purse was grabbed from out of her stroller!
Could unfettered capitalism be a breeding ground for criminality, petty and otherwise? In case you’re worried, however, that the area is in decline, your elected leaders have already taken steps to improve the area. After all, nothing makes a community safer (short of an actual feeling of community) than an enormous slab calling itself a basketball stadium. Which is to say, the area was already a hotbed of (white collar) wrongdoing; perhaps it’s not wealth that trickles down, but criminality.
[photo]
