Try to walk at night in some district of Tehran at night .
Did you assume I'm making things up? I've been to Nazi Abad and its entire surroundings in the middle of the night, at daytime also to Khaksefid and similar places. At night there was hardly anyone outside to begin with. Nothing to do with major western cities, where criminals are omnipresent roaming the streets in problematic neighborhoods.
Tehran is a walk through the park compared to London or Paris, let alone to urban centers of the USA (which I'm not familiar with, but they're worse than European ones, this much is for sure).
Iranians in the broad sense aren't acquainted with what a ghetto estate in London or Paris or even in certain areas of Brussels, Stockholm, Berlin etc actually looks like. Gangs will get suspicious of any stranger making an appearance because during the day, these gangs are engaging in large scale organized drug trafficking in the stairways of residential buildings, before everyone's eyes. The soil inside these buildings is sometimes covered with urine and trash because public services do not work properly and have abandoned these neighborhoods. Firearms are illegally stored in the basements. In fact, authorities tolerate the drug trade in various municipalities because the economic survival of families in these areas is dependent upon it.
Under normal circumstances police cannot even move in and arrest the ringleaders because if they try, they'll get pelted with stones and bulky objects, up to TV sets and refrigerators from out of the windows of aesthetically disgusting, depressing high rise concrete blocks these estates are made of. Police forces can only intervene en masse, they need to mobilize dozens if not hundreds of personnel to that effect. And even that may trigger riots involving the entire male youth population of the estate.
If one's lucky, one won't get directly mugged by some drunk or drugged thug. Or, simply, beaten half dead just "for fun". I know of people in the UK who used to walk up to random passersby from behind, and crush a glass bottle on their backheads for no apparent reason
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In France, one popular practice among street thugs (aged between 16 and 25, usually) was what they call "doing a circle" on someone ("faire un cercle"): in a schoolyard, in a metro station or anywhere else on the streets, they'll pick somebody on a purely random basis, encircle and then proceed to gratuitously beating the living daylights out of them, not seldom by kicking them repeatedly in their heads once they'd fallen to the ground. You can hardly take the metro in Paris on a saturday night without crossing at least one group of thugs, and that often means trouble.
Not surprising that tens of thousands of "I"SIS savages were recruited from these milieus.
It would make the mind of an average Tehrani spin if I told them about the brutalities I've either witnessed or heard first-hand testimonies of here in Europe. I don't like to disclose personal information, but will just say this much: these experiences include not just one but several individuals gravely wounding or outright murdering a parent of theirs, school girls getting raped inside college toilets, and much more.
So, we should stop comparing the west and Iran in terms violence, crime and insecurity. They're like apples and oranges.
Not cherry picking just wanted to point out every city have districts that are not suitable for relaxation walking at midnight.
But some cities are clearly worse than others. Western urban centers of similar size are worse off than Tehran. And Iranians who get their information from the BBC and Manoto or have no clue of what's going on around here.
t.co
