>> including poverty and bad schools.
I'm pretty familiar with Pine Bluff, having owned a business there and lived nearby for half my life, and having had siblings living there most of my years.
The city of Pine Bluff has been predominantly black for decades and is now more than 70% black. But lest you think that is due to "white flight", that simply isn't the case -- as far back as I can remember, the city had an inordinately large black population. The crime was bad 30 years ago when my sister worked in the Emergency Room at the county's only hospital, and at that time they handled a higher per-capital knife/GSW rate than any hospital in the country. That was before the white-flight had begun to take hold.
It is so bad there it may be the first city in the country to experience BLACK flight. I know of multiple black physicians who have shut their practices down and moved elsewhere to get out of Pine Bluff.
The schools issue is addressed in a comment on the original article -- out of a school with 800 kids, a total of 12 parents showed up for teacher conferences. That's not a school problem nor is it a kid problem. That's a PARENT problem. Many fine black families live in Pine Bluff, but there is something wrong when families are disengaged from their kids' education like that.
It would be smart for people to take note of the 10 most dangerous cities in the country and try to establish the common thread:
1. Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn, Michigan
2. Pine Bluff, Arkansas
3. Flint, Michigan
4. Memphis, Tennessee/ Mississippi/Arkansas
5. Stockton, California
6. New Orleans, Louisiana
7. Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
8. Little Rock, Arkansas
9. Mobile, Alabama
10. Jackson, Tennessee
Most of the cities share a particular attribute that makes them dangerous. After spending trillions of dollars to try to eliminate poverty the crime has only gotten worse, in Pine Bluff and elsewhere. |
