Exaggerations won't help your case.
I've been in attendance at UH for 5 years now, for both my Bachelor's and Master's degrees, and worked in the library (O'Quinn) of the school you attended for half of that time.
While the crime is awful, and much worse than the naysayers are portraying it as, and the Third Ward is, in fact, ghetto, as opposed to how the naysayers are trying to portray it (I don't know how you could claim to the contrary with a straight face), the amount of crime isn't even close to "1-3 gunpoint muggings weekly."
Hyperbole like that tends to take credibility from an otherwise valid argument.