This is Flint, MI. According to the American Psychological Association, the word TRAUMA is “an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape or natural disaster.”
In an urban environment such as Flint, MI, long suffering from high unemployment, little hope, rampant drug use and ease of access to military style assault rifles, the two combined equal two things – increased body counts and “war-like” wounded numbers (versus the average mid-sized American city).
In the time frame 6/21/12 through 8/20/12, FPO’s unofficial count is 16 killed, 78 wounded. Of the 16 homicides, 14 died from gunfire, one from a stabbing and the last one from strangulation.
Of the 78 wounded, the breakdown is: 56 from shootings and 22 from stabbings. All of this in the last 60 days.
The United States Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) counts five categories of crime as violent crimes: murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault.
Here at FPO, we do not have the manpower or the resources needed to scrutinize all of the crimes or even violent crimes such as rape, robbery and assault.
We attempt to INFORM our fellow citizens of crime in our City (and Genesee County) via social media. We are methodically utilizing this platform to be an umbrella organization for all of the crime watch groups, neighborhood associations in our City and the community as a whole.
FPO-Citizens Informing Citizens, Inc. is the Nation’s largest Anti-Crime Social Media group with over 42,000+ likes on Facebook, 7800 on Twitter and a weekly reach averaging 150,000+ over the last two months.
In addition, our web site, www.flintpoliceops.com, has been viewed by some 186,000+ people in the last seven weeks alone.
FPO volunteers are comprised of people from all backgrounds – we are young and old, white and black, blue collar and white collar and one of us is active duty US Military. We are all Citizen Volunteers. None of us have journalistic backgrounds.
In the beginning, some of us did NOT know how to “cut and paste” properly. Most of us did NOT know how to embed audio files. Some of us did not know how to “link” files from the web to Facebook (or vice versa). We truly are novices in many respects.
Flint, MI is our hometown. We will continue to INFORM others. We will continue to make others aware of crime in our neighborhoods, our schools and at events.
Lastly, we would like to say thank you to all of the health care professionals at HMC, McLaren and Genesys who deal daily with the stabbings and shootings, the madness and the mayhem of all that goes on locally. Without the health care professionals (including the EMTs), there is “little doubt” on the minds of many that the homicide count would be much higher. Well done Trauma teams!
Our motto is “See Something, Say Something!” We might add – Make That Call!
UPDATE #1 11:35 p.m. 8/21/12 – it has came to our attention that on or about 8/13/12 there was a second shooting on Flint Park – male was wounded. So 79 wounded in that 60 day stretch, 57 from gunfire and 22 from stabbings.
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