We interrupt our regularly scheduled news day to bring you one of those Internet-only to-dos that flare up now and then. Apparently there was a site called "Ghetto Tracker," which was renamed, after much criticism, "Good Part of Town," and has now been taken offline with this message from the founder:
"This site is gone. It's not worth the trouble."
Gawker had this to say about the site...
GhettoTracker.com is just as deplorable as its name suggests. The website, which surfaced yesterday on Hacker News and PandoDaily, invites users to rate neighborhoods based on "which parts of town are safe and which ones are ghetto, or unsafe." Unsafe to whom? Well, the gleaming white family on its "About" page, of course.
GhettoTracker's "ghettos" aren't identified based on mugging statistics or murder rates—or any hard data at all, really. Instead, "ghettos" are determined by the site's users and delineated by their prejudices. It's a new, crowd-sourced twist on stop-and-frisk: Just drop a little red dot anywhere you think upstanding folks should stop-and-avoid.
We were trying to find out which Bay Area neighborhoods had been pegged not "The Good Part of Town" when the site went down.
Anyway, before going offline, the creator of the site explained himself this way in a post:
I have seen people jump on the bandwagon, make assumptions, and write articles about how this site is meant to help white people avoid minorities or help rich people avoid poor people. This assertion is laughable considering I am a minority who is so far from rich I would classify myself as poor.
I am a regular guy who started a website with the intentions of helping people stay safe. Nothing more and nothing less.
Twitter, naturally, has had a field day. Just a couple ...
Protect your white grandparents from poor people! #GhettoTracker pic.twitter.com/NoWOxROQ6v
— Dana Liebelson (@dliebelson) September 4, 2013
hahahahahaha--->>> "According to the site, the Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn is a 'ghetto.' ” http://t.co/ekYm6dp4mP
— Clara Jeffery (@ClaraJeffery) September 4, 2013
You can read the Gawker's correspondence with the site's creator here.