The good news: Birmingham is nationally ranked for something. The bad news: we're #11 on the most dangerous cities in America, right between Philadelphia and Newark, NJ. Here are our sad statistics.....
31 murders per 100,000 people
71 forcible rapes per 100,000 people
461 robberies per 100,000 people
Now, it must be recognized that Birmingham is basically two cities....Birmingham-proper, northside, and Westend which is where 99% of the violent crime is, and what we call Over-the-Mountain or the burbs south of town.
The city where I live, Hoover, which is a suburb of Birmingham was bragging the other day about not having any killings so far this year. The next day, a body was found behind a gas station....we joked that he was probably killed somewhere else and dumped there just to make the suburbs appear as dangerous as the city, but who knows?
You may remember that Jefferson County is trying to dig out of the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history....every bit of it due to political corruption and utter incompetence, the kind of municipal corruption that breeds indigence, dependence, and crime. It's no coincidence that like other failing American cities like Detroit, New Orleans, Oakland, Cleveland, and DC, Birmingham has been (mis)managed entirely by democrats for generations. (24 politicians an cronies are in jail for corruption).
Birmingham proper only has about 250,000 people that account for all this crime, but the metro area is well over 1million. Rather than improving the city for everyone, everything in B'ham is still about the civil-rights movement.....no event happens here without including a curtsy to civil rights struggle of 60 years ago. The irony is that by trying to show how far we've come in all things racial, we've mired ourselves in our own past.
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