I got a very early lesson in how not-dangerous cities are b/c I was 19 when I moved from The Woods(tm) to The Big City(tm) for the first time and I was also suicidally depressed and I got it into my head that if I spent enough time wandering about in The Bad Part of Town(tm) eventually some manner of Dangerous Criminal(tm) would show up and attempt to do violence to me, which sounded like a decently rock-and-roll way to die when you're 19 years old and have a lot of untreated mental illnesseses.
So what happened was I spent a lot of free time getting drunk and aimlessly wandering around the city, where I had lots of interesting conversations with lots of perfectly nice people, which helped a lot with the suicidal depression it turned out.