As your recent experience points out, these crimes aren't the cliche, late at night on an empty street in the bad part of town scenario. It can go down anywhere, almost anytime.
Since I have lived in the city I have been the subject of three attempted attacks. I say attempted because I was never finished off nor did the perps manage to rob me. In two of the incidents I did incur some punches to the head but like Rob I happened to just notice the perps closing in just in time to bolt out of the way before they could really put me on the ground. The last time was right off Riverside Drive around 96th St. in broad daylight at about 3PM on a Sunday. With plenty of people around on the street. The perps were three teenagers. They were surprised when the two blows they managed to land on the back of my head didn't floor me and in a second I was standing between two parked cars so they couldn't close in. By then an older woman on the other side of the street was screaming (on my behalf I guess) and the heavies ran off. I had a nice knot behind my ear as a souvenier for about a week. And of course at the time of the incident there wasn't a cop within eight blocks to be found.
The latest figures show something like over 50 percent of African American males in the city are unemployed. It is a very old story really, when the motive is robbery.
The thought occured to me the other day that we have a civil society seemingly intent on disadvantaging a whole population by keeping them out of work. And that the parameters of what can qualify a person to be criminalized now have been broadened to the point where if you are out of work for any length of time you are pretty much going to end up criminalized for something. -It's all so dysfunctional. Then the governement ( with our tax dollars ) ends up paying like forty grand a year to incarcerate each individual. It is almost as if we are taxed to criminalize a whole segment of the population and that is supposed to be some kind of societal favor on our behalf.
But I also wonder (in keeping with this topic) how many beatings are labelled as robbery attempts by the cops when they are really bias crimes against gays.
Another mark of a sick society is: one that openly encourages anti-gay attitudes and beliefs, then has to clean up after itself when the attitudes it encourages result in someone's beating or even death. Almost like the society is just pretending it is wrong to do violence to a gay person.