I am glad that you pursued this to the end and in a professional manner. That will always preserve your good relationship with a good MSC. (AND, there are very few bad apples.)

One note about "high crime" areas. I really had to learn a large swath of DC and its close-in suburbs during 19 years of selling real estate all over the area. What I learned was that while there were some high crime areas, so of those were only dangerous at night. A very few were dangerous for everyone, all the time. (Including the many good folks who were trapped living there.) and other had a bad rep for the whole area when, in fact, 90+ percent of the crime happened to be assaults and robberies inside of a couple of poorly policed public parking garages aand inside a couple of apartment complexes. Just reading the local crime reports and realizing where/what the addresses were would often tell me that just going to a bank or a convenience stare during the day was not going to be a problem for anyone who was alert to their surroundings. The same caveats applied regardless of the ethnic composition of the neighborhoods, btw. I ended up with only 3 relatively small areas where I declined to operate during daylight hours. And, in the past decade, one of the most notorious has become the hip new place for young professionals to live and its playground is newly populated with growing families having fun. (It now also has a hip new name for the neighborhood!)

I feel perfectly fine there during the day. Evening is a different story because it seems that there is an increase in violent crimes at night. During the day, it is mostly just sexual harassment. During the time of the shop, it was early evening and I knew I could not stay there long.