Village life: It's about fear of crime

This month, this column gave me fits.

I usually sit down and write glibly about attics, or my fourth-grade permanent that went wrong, or backyards — things that might bring a smile and wouldn't ripple the flow of Gilkey Creek.

But this time, I'm trying to say something about crime. The words are coming hard. Our shared "village life," dear neighbors, is on my mind. In this season of our communal fear, anger, worry and discontent, the picture is complicated. I feel uneasy and perplexed. I'm a little worried about us.

And when it comes to crime, and the fear of crime — when it comes to the relationship of our neighborhood with criminals and those we think might be criminals — there is no "happy place."  There isn't much to laugh about.

As everybody knows, there have been a lot of break-ins. There is a perception, voiced at neighborhood association meetings, that the numbers are up. Both City Councilman Dale Weighill and Judge Cathy Dowd have tried to extract verifying stats from City Hall — Weighill says so far to no avail.

But one by one, stories converge and pile up. A pattern of audacity (increasing desperation?) in the incidents emerges.

A break-in isn't the same as a homicide. It isn't as photogenic as a burned-out house. But it's personal. It's our stuff. It's about our homes, what we love.

And it's about our children. In a blessed consequence of dropping home values, children are re-appearing in the neighborhood, as young families discover decent deals. I love the proliferation of children on my street, their voices and little plastic bikes and daily dramas.

But there are several elephants in the 'hood.

The first elephant is race. That painful element of life in segregated Flint simmers under many stews. In fact, the perpetrators of many of the recent home invasions have apparently been African-American.  Since most of us are white, well, how do I put this?  It has been noticed. We are good, polite and decent people — not racists, right?  So how do we manage the primal fears that chill us?

The second elephant is class — invariably, the less spoken thing — the voodoo doll with a hovering pin, the eyes behind the blindfold. It's Flint, baby. Some of those earliest auto tycoons, rowdy geniuses, also were ruthless and greedy fellows not so far removed from hardscrabble life.

Yet for some of them, and their wives, keeping poor people in their place was a dogged necessity. Class division permeates our communal identity to the core. It's been here, I suspect, since before Joseph Smith. As uncomfortable as race, without familiar rhetoric to call upon.

And our territory, which local walker Reggie Kaigler forthrightly calls the "rich neighborhood" in his YouTube videos of Flint, sits there in all its loveliness, one remaining artifact of better times, its housing values sagging like the spent peonies dropping petals around our cherished masonry.

A target.

By the way, Reggie is a big African-American guy and walks around with a backpack on. He will not hurt you or steal your stuff. Say hello sometime. He's a former UM-Flint student and AmeriCorps volunteer with a good mind and a knack for social commentary. Just so you know.

In a way, the numbers don't matter. Even one story, vivid and local, I suspect, would be enough to move us to action.

Did you hear about, did you hear about?

The word travels efficiently among us. The way we all talk to each other — in person across fences and on walks, our dogs waiting patiently as we pause to catch up, how we keep up on Facebook, on e-mail, by cell phone. It's a comfort and protection. It's neighborly.

Did you hear about my neighbors? How somebody walked right in, when they were in the basement, and they heard footsteps, and when they came upstairs there he was, pretending to be a fundraiser for a school? And how after they edged him out they realized he'd taken off with a wallet and cell phone?

Yes, that happened across the street from me. I'd just been there myself to see their new baby, and that's why the front screen door was open. I was so entranced by the infant's sweetness, as I walked back across the street to my own house I never looked to the left or right. He must have been right there. I felt responsible.

This much is clear and undeniable — we want to be safe.

And we want to protect what we have. Living in Flint is never easy, even for those of us lucky enough to have jobs and our solid, beautiful homes and our beloved silver maples. Tension is never far off, buzzing like an indoor fly. Threats to our security lurk like a coyote in our neatly tended yards.

As I've asserted with tiresome insistence, I don't want walking to be criminalized. And I don't want people of color to be targeted by the longbows of paranoia and suspicion. And I don't want our understandable angst about protecting ourselves to swerve into vigilantism.

People from the neighborhood association are going door to door, talking to all of us. I love that.

As I told my neighbors recently, I keep envisioning that we could be the kind of folks who'd swarm intruders with smothering good cheer.

The way I imagine it, every time we see somebody "suspicious" on the street, we'd all rush out of our houses with relentless, nosey friendliness.

"Hey, pilgrim," we'd shout, incessantly, from one house to the next.  "How you doin?  Who are you?  What brings you here? How 'bout them Tigers? What's your view of health care reform? How do you feel about urban chickens?"

Oh, there I go, with my silly absurdities. Others are coming up with sound strategies that make more sense.

But hear me well. We are together in this life, in this city, in our unceasing challenges. Not just the people of Blanchard and Kensington, but the people of Avon and Avenue A and MLK and the state streets and Fenton Road.

We can't wall ourselves off. I hope it's a savvy, practical grace we turn to in our struggles to survive.

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Columnist and Poet Jan Worth-Nelson has lived within walking distance of East Village Magazine since 1981. Her 2006 Peace Corps novel, Night Blind, is widely available. You can find her essays, fiction and poetry on her web site, www.janworth.com and her blog, http://nightblindblog.blogspot.com/index.htm. She teaches writing at UM-Flint.