The ghost of stereotypes past haunts Iowa City. In the last few years, it’s been taking the form of a black teenage boy, fresh off the bus from Chicago with a few ounces of crack and a switchblade or two. He has an unmarried mother, probably just as strung-out, and for fun he likes to rob some nice white native Iowans. This mythic archetype lingers around every newspaper story about the Southeast Side, crime reports, and rising crime rates; it’s not uncommon for at least one commentator on The Daily Iowan or Press-Citizen to ironically thank Chicago for the latest headline-grabbing knife fight. To hear all this, you might think the Southeast Side is some inner-city ghetto mysteriously transplanted to Iowa City, disturbing our American dream.

Here’s the problem: The briefest of inquiries throws this into doubt. The Press-Citizen has crime statistics over the past six years, broken up by neighborhood; and there is no significant increase in violent crime in the Southeast Side. It appears that 2008, “the year that crime came to Iowa City,” may have been a fluke; statistics from 2009 aren’t much different from those in 2003. Individuals’ reports also don’t corroborate this myth; an editorial in the Press-Citizen written by Bethany Brender, an AmeriCorps worker at the Broadway Neighborhood Center, claims that Southeast Iowa City really isn’t that different from the rest of Iowa City. The DI reported in March that a forum hosted by University of Iowa faculty found that most people’s perceptions of the Southeast Side were, in fact, incorrect.

So why do people still believe this great fable? In part, it’s because the interventions by the city aimed at reducing crime rate have encouraged the stereotype. The widespread curfews on youth enacted earlier this year, regardless of effectiveness, link teenage activity to crime; the DI’s editorial on July 8 about the curfew mentions Southeast Iowa City more than any other region. John Deng’s death last summer prompted a new wave of stereotypes: The Deng shooting could easily be oversimplified to an officer protecting a white Iowa native from a black transient. Details of the Deng case aside, it created large divisions within the Iowa City community, notably (but not solely) on racial lines.

The other part of it is that belief in this myth is easy. It’s easy to criminalize the other and easy to look at the unfamiliar with suspicion. It’s especially easy to blame Chicago, the Southeast Side, and Section 8 Housing for the problems of a changing city. To look at Southeast Iowa City as one great homogenous mass of Chicago exports, and to see every crime tinged with the shadow of this outside force, is almost … comforting, if your world is changing and you’re not sure what to think. But it denies an entire chunk of our city their humanity, culture, and identity. In the end, mythic archetypes of inner-city thugs are incorrect; worse than that, they are fundamentally dehumanizing.

If Iowa City truly wants to reduce crime — like all good municipalities — its government and populace need to stop treating citizens like criminals. Instead, treat them like people who want what’s best for themselves, their families, and their communities. That’s who we are, after all.