If you’ve been around Greenfield for very long you’re sure to have heard that Greenfield is known as “Little Chicago”, a small town with a questionable reputation. All the years I grew up here I’d occasionally hear that claim. However, I must not have taken it seriously because I never felt insecure or scared while running the streets and allies as a young boy, which I did lots of.

As an adult, I’ve come to realize that there is nothing unique about Greenfield and its people. Like every other community, we have our problems and our problems are pretty much related, to the population size, educational level, and economic opportunity and income. Large cities with bad schools, high levels of ignorance, low incomes, and poor chances for advancement have the same difficulties as small rural communities. The difference is mainly the number of people. The more people the more problems. Even places that have none of these problems have problems.

Several decades ago the Walt Disney company constructed a planned community near it’s Florida Disney World. They called it Celebration City and designed it to be straight out of Walt’s utopian image of what he believed our past once was.

It contained perfect homes with perfect picket fences, on perfect streets, lined with perfect trees and out front of each perfect home was a perfect front porch where perfect neighbors would stroll by each evening and have perfectly delightful chats.

There was to be no crime, no bad people, no signs of poverty, no peeling paint pickets, no rusting cars at the curbs, and no moldy stuffed sofas adorning those perfect front porches. Everyone was to have perfect dispositions, good jobs, and mouths with perfectly straight and brilliantly white teeth.

Well, not even Walt Disney could pull that off. In 2010 the town had its first murder and since 2016 the citizens have been embroiled in a legal wrangle with those responsible for keeping the Disney bubble intact.

If nothing else, Celebration city just shows that when two or more people decided to live in close proximity trouble and problems will raise their ugly heads.

All this came about when a person I know made a comment about Greenfield still being that Little Chicago. Implying that my town had more problems than their town.

So, I did a little digging a quickly came across a breakdown of crime in Greenfield, Ohio. Spend some time looking at the charts and arrows and you’ll see that in some areas we’re doing pretty good and not so good in others. But, I’ll bet the farm that if you use the same source of information but type your town’s name in the Google search bar, you’ll find out that much is the same. Click the YourTown button to see Greenfield’s crime score. Then Google your town.