12/2/03
Discussion

It’s easiest to look at my questions in three groups one through six, seven and eight, and then nine and ten.
For the first three questions of were somebody feels safe. The numbers showed my expectations that most if not all the people I surveyed said they feel safe in Malibu, their hometown. A little more then half of the people said they feel safe in the area of Santa Monica and about none of them feel safe in Downtown LA. This is what I expected. But then when I asked the follow up three questions I began to get responses that don’t exactly fit with the answers I got in the first three. Close to half of the people that I asked, “If they felt threatened in the areas they said no?” Said they don’t feel that their life is in jeopardy in those areas. To me that posses a contradiction; I think somebody would feel threatened in an area they didn’t feel safe in. To question five the split was six/six, which makes sense, but I feel that more people would have answered yes to this question more if I had provided a more anonymous questionnaire. Question Six makes concrete my conclusion about MHS views. In this question the majority all but one said the answers they told me felt reasonable in their minds. But the contrast in the way they answered showed instead that MHS students feel threatened in places were typographically minorities are the majority. But strive to be politically correct in hindsight.
Questions seven and eight, I asked about drugs weather or not they were used by a dominate amount of people in school and where they came from. Most students said that “yes” drug use is on the rise at Malibu, kind of a “no dhu” if you sit around at lunch. The interesting thing for me was that most people said they thought that it wasn’t minorities that supplied the student body with drugs. So who could it be? If not minorities… The only other choice you’d really have was white upper middle class people selling to their own peers and kids. Again the stereotype has proven false that is not a shady Mexican in the alleys of Point Dume selling his bathtub crank to middle school children. It is something else.
My ending questions nine and ten were centered on the justification to lock oneself in at night. I actually got one or two more votes contradiction my first thoughts. Overall you have the majority of people saying they lock their doors but knows nobody who has actually been broken into.
So maybe Malibu students view crime in that old fashioned view of stereotypes for whatever reason. Maybe though the have more to fear from crank dealing white people out for a thrill?