US Urban Decay and Decline Fuels Rising Violence and the Use of Firearms

CRIME - Discount chains are thriving in the US. However, this excerpt from an article by By Alec MacGillis in the New Yorker gives an idea about the danger of working or shopping in stores that have gradually replaced the more upmarket shops that once existed in these neighbourhoods. 

Gun Violence Archive is an excellent resource for understanding the level of gun-related violence in the US. You can find it here. The statistics are truly shocking: https://www.gunviolencearchive.org

Insecure 'gig economy' jobs, inequality, high unemployment and rampant drug use and alcohol abuse combined with the offshoring of better-paid manufacturing jobs are all contributing to urban decay and decline.  

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On November 1, 2018, Woods went to work on his day off, to fill in for an absent co-worker. Footage from a security camera shows a man entering the store just after 1 p.m., wearing a blue sweatshirt with the hood pulled up over a red cap, and holding a silver gun. He fired down the centre aisle, hitting Woods in the back of the head. Then he pointed the gun at the cash register, before seeming to panic. He ran out of the store empty-handed. An ambulance arrived, but Woods was no longer breathing. After his body was removed, Dollar General remained open for several hours, before closing amid protests from residents.

Woods’s murder was one of three homicides in six months at the two discount chains in the St. Louis area. On June 13th, a man and a woman started arguing in a car in the parking lot of a Family Dollar on West Florissant Avenue, just outside the city line; he shot her once in the head, killing her. Less than a month after Woods’s death, a sixty-five-year-old woman was shopping at the Family Dollar on St. Charles Rock Road when a seemingly mentally ill thirty-four-year-old woman grabbed steak knives from a shelf in the store and stabbed her to death.

The Gun Violence Archive, a Web site that uses local news reports and law-enforcement sources to tally crimes involving firearms, lists more than two hundred violent incidents involving guns at Family Dollar or Dollar General stores since the start of 2017, nearly fifty of which resulted in deaths. The incidents include carjackings in the parking lot, drug deals that have gone bad, and altercations inside stores. But a large number involve armed robberies in which workers or customers have been shot. Since the beginning of 2017, employees have been wounded in shootings or pistol-whippings in at least thirty-one robberies; in at least seven other incidents, employees have been killed. The violence has not let up in recent months when requirements for customers to wear masks have made it harder for clerks to detect shoppers who are bent on robbery. In early May, a worker at a Family Dollar in Flint, Michigan, was fatally shot after refusing entry to a customer without a mask.

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The article shows the problems associated with urban decay, and the risks to those who work in stores that are open all hours.

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Image: Courtesy of the New Yorker.