/blog/2006/06/michael-breens-orientalism-part-ii/ But I fear more for Muninn... Thu, 16 May 2013 14:30:52 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.2 /blog/2006/06/michael-breens-orientalism-part-ii/comment-page-1/#comment-12921 Sat, 17 Jun 2006 12:37:22 +0000 http://muninn.net/blog/2006/06/michael-breens-orientalism-part-ii.html#comment-12921 That is interesting stuff. Actually, to his credit, Breen says that there is a difference between perception and reality of crime – at least if you include burglaries which are apparently very common for houses as opposed to apartments. He claims though, and I don’t know anything about this myself, that the streets are safe and street crime is low. I must agree that I certainly feel quite safe on the streets from what little wandering I have done in the seedier areas of Seoul at night but that is hardly scientific.

]]> /blog/2006/06/michael-breens-orientalism-part-ii/comment-page-1/#comment-12914 Sat, 17 Jun 2006 11:03:39 +0000 http://muninn.net/blog/2006/06/michael-breens-orientalism-part-ii.html#comment-12914 I realize that Breen, not crime is your point here, but what is street crime like in Korea? I ask because when I lived in Taiwan crime patterns were quite different than in the U.S. and I was told that this was in part due to a very different attitude about the role of the state. Almost no gun crime, but lots of cat burglary. My landlord had big metal bars on all the windows even though we were 7 stories up, and supposedly the reason was that the police were indifferent to property crimes against ordinary citizens, and so protecting your own was your job. The police also supposedly had pretty good relations with local criminal gangs, and so if you did something that really annoyed the police you could count on having them hunt you down with the help of the 四海幫. A very different local crime situation but for historical rather than racial reasons.

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