Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Flint doesn't even rank when it comes to brutal, homicidal violence

I'm always happy when Flint is not included in a list ranking cities by some horrific crime statistic, so I was more than pleased when I finished reading a recent article in Foreign Policy listing "five cities that stand in a class all their own when it comes to brutal, homicidal violence." Why was I more than pleased? The Vehicle City was nowhere to be found.

Here are the unlucky winners:

Caracas, Venezuela
Cape Town, South Africa
New Orleans
Moscow
Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea



1 comment:

  1. A few years back a t-shirt that read "Flint: Toughest Town Around Since 1855" was quite popular amonst the suburban poser set. These kids would slum about Buckham Alley listening to 3rd wave ska and pop punk whilst publicly disgracing Flint, punk rock, and the art of gutter slumming. Anyways, I always fantasized about transporting these suburban slime molds Star Trek style to Port Au Prince or Baghdad or Gary. Now those are some baddddd places.

    Just a note on Port Moresby. According to Robert Pelton Young's book The World's Most Dangerous Places your chances of getting raped on the streets of Papua New Guinea's capitol city is somewhere between 99-100%.

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for commenting. I moderate comments, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You might enjoy my book about Flint called "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City," a Michigan Notable Book for 2014 and a finalist for the 33rd Annual Northern California Book Award for Creative NonFiction. Filmmaker Michael Moore described Teardown as "a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once-great American city." More information about Teardown is available at www.teardownbook.com.