10ofRods
Verified Anthropologist
- Joined
- Jun 27, 2019
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That is smart, but honestly everyone I know buys and sells online and I don't know a single person who meets at the Police station. They either meet at one of the buyer/sellers house or meet at a carpool etc. I personally always make my bf meet people because I am paranoid, but I just don't think the general public is even remotely aware of how dangerous life is.
IMO you are above average careful and it is not common for people especially youth to act in such a way. I am in Canada though so maybe we are just more careless here.
And where I live, no one in their right mind meets at their house. The police are on nextdoor.com warning people not to do so and offering the large police station lot. Murder rates in my county are approximately the same as Utah's (about twice as high as Canada's). At any rate, all it takes is one or two locally publicized crimes regarding Craiglist/Facebook Marketplace and people are going to be way more cautious.
Surely, though, even in Canada, if you had to meet a stranger at 3 am, you'd prefer a police station than a deserted park?
These days, there are so many people whose stuff goes missing when they have a garage sale, that they are getting to be rare as hen's teeth in my neighborhood (we had a person inside our house, going through a closet, having sneaked in while we were busy with the garage sale; this person was a homeless mentally ill person, but it still was quite uncomfortable). Other people I know have had outright thefts - so no one even has garage sales any more.
Utah is somewhere in the middle...but my friends in Utah are pretty cautious too (but we're all middle-aged...or older).