Ah, good ol' Jersey. This is a bit off topic but in 1967 I was offered a job in Newark. Walking down the streets to the interview I was struck by the number of bars in the street-level windows of townhouses. That told me volumes and I went through the motions of the interview and was offered the job. I said "No thanks" without giving my real reason: my personal safety.
Newark is a toilet, but they spare no expense in police protection for the small downtown (at least between 9 and 5). Everyone else in NJ knows it is an unsafe area, so the media blackout on crime doesn’t help them. They just had their minor league baseball team fold after probably a dozen years in business; at the time it opened they pretended it would keep white people on the welfare reservation spending money, but it really was a third-rate product (unaffiliated nobodies).