Karakura's Crime Rate and How It Affects Us.
William O. Wisp, May 12th, 2025.
William O. Wisp, May 12th, 2025.
I’m sure we all know someone who’s seen some type of crime or illegal activity within the city of Karakura before. Whether it be friends, families, or acquaintances, or perhaps you’ve even seen it firsthand. Maybe it was when you were walking home from school, lounging about at the plaza, or even on school grounds itself. Either way, it’s impossible to escape when living here, and it’s safe to say that the majority of people have grown desensitized to its presence in our lives, but how is that affecting our youth?
The rampant crime that occurs within the town of Karakura has created a unique culture seen through the people of Karakura, including those in school, that revolves around trying to live day-to-day life alongside it. Whether this is shown through avoiding illegal activities, participating in them, or something in between, there’s no doubt that growing up in a society such as this one would have its effects on the younger residents of Karakura.
When choosing whether one should focus on finishing their homework before the deadline or focus on trying to survive making it home in the afternoon, there’s a clear winner. And inevitably, their grades drop as they prioritize their own safety over their schoolwork and begin to fail classes. But, can you really blame them? Trying to divide your attention between safety and education is extremely stressful, especially when dealing with events in your life that come with being a teenager at the same time. Nine times out of ten, you’d choose prioritizing your own safety as well.
How the high crime rate of Karakura affects the students of Karakura high shines not only through their grades, but through their discipline and manners as well. The normalization of crime and, by extension, the desensitization of it causes students to internalize this behavior and replicate on school grounds.
Karakura highschool is littered with bullying, fights, gang activity, and other unruly behavior, most of which are targeted towards each other. This creates an unsafe environment that only serves in creating a perpetual cycle of encouragement of this behavior between children in school. This is also massively heightened by the already existing crime in Karakura as a whole.
The effect this has on the behavior of students has not only become noticeable within the interactions between peers, but also in the interactions of students and school staff. It is a well-known fact among our school that there has been a rising issue of respect between students and educators over the course of the school’s lifetime, and it is obvious when taking a look in the majority of hosted classes. Students simply don’t respect the authority of teachers and professors anymore.
Ill-behaved students causing problems within the classroom make classes practically useless in terms of education because of how hard it can be to pay attention with constant disruptions. This is likely to be one of the possible causes for the common occurrence of students skipping classes as well as, going to one where you’ll only be subject to the disrespect of others simply isn’t worth it.
Not only does this negatively affect peers, but it builds agitation between school staff and students as well. Although I believe that the majority of the staff are underappreciated when it comes to how much they must put up with in school. Of course, this doesn’t mean that teachers aren’t completely innocent in this matter either.
I have had my fair share of teachers and caretakers treating me unfairly, possibly due to the stress of herding troublemaking students on a daily basis. I do not approve of this behavior from staff, obviously, as unfair treatment from staff is never okay, but I also do believe that there are possible explanations for it. Even if having a reason for it does excuse it, they are people too and cannot make perfect judgements one hundred percent of the time, especially when under stress.
Now that we’ve established that students not only have to stress about their health and safety outside of school, but within it too, how could one operate perfectly when put under this amount of stress?
Stress piles up, higher and higher, until it completely blocks your view. Mistakes in daily life get more frequent as it does and it becomes harder to see the tasks ahead of you when the current ones keep piling up. It becomes almost impossible to do your best when there’s a mountain in front of you that you’re expected to climb.
When it comes down to it, students just can’t always be expected to be able to do their best when being forced to divide their attention across so many stressful events in their daily life. Though there isn’t much we as students can do about the crime itself, we can still spare just a few moments of understanding to each other to try and make it more bearable.