LETTERS: IT IS SAFER IN THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES

To the editor:

Columnist Jack Stapleton paints a bleak and all-too-accurate portrait of U.S. urban life ("SOS: Save our cities," May 22).

I have to take exception, though, to his utterly unfounded remarks regarding U.S. urban "neighborhoods that more closely resemble poverty-stricken, crime-infested Third World countries" and his advocacy of taking action "before our metropolitan areas become even worse than those in the Third World."

I have bad news for Stapleton and his readers. As a career overseas teacher since 1983, I have lived and worked in several of those Third World countries, including some of the poorest nations in the world: Sudan, Ethiopia, Honduras and Sri Lanka. Like the overwhelming majority of U.S. expatriates, I feel far safer on the streets of Addis Ababa or Colombo or Khartoum or Tegucigalpa even at night than I do in St. Louis -- or even parts of Cape Girardeau -- during the day.

Poverty does not cause crime. People cause crime. If it were otherwise, why is violent street crime -- rape, armed robbery, assault, murder -- practically unknown in such overcrowded urban areas as Bangkok, Jakarta, Cairo, Calcutta and La Paz, all of whose streets I have wandered in perfect security after the sun has set?

It might be helpful if, instead of dismissing Third World countries as a horrible example to be avoided at all costs, writers like Stapleton -- and perhaps some of our government policymakers -- would set themselves to trying to discover why the crime rate in poverty-stricken Sudan is about one-fiftieth of that in urban areas in the prosperous U.S. Midwest.

GORDON HEITZEBERG

Cape Girardeau