About five years ago, I began hearing residents saying something I hadn’t heard much of before: Flin Flon was no longer a safe community.
That was a foreign idea to me. Sure, I had long reported on local crime, including the handful of “really serious” offences that happen each year.
I even had a friend who rented a suite in a home that was the target of an unsuccessful (though terrifying) arson. And a friend of a friend had her car smashed to a pulp by a bat-wielding assailant.
Once, when I lived at the East Street apartments (in the “good” part of town), a man banged on my neighbour’s door and yelled, “I’m gonna kill you, you b-tch!” Although he was drunk and probably didn’t mean it, it was unsettling.
But Flin Flon as an “unsafe community”? That seemed like a stretch. It felt more like Flin Flon as a “community where some awful things happen from time to time but which is generally safe.”
Looking back, I could not see past my own bias. I personally had not seen or experienced much crime of consequence in Flin Flon, so crime couldn’t be much of a worry.
Then you actually talk to people in other neighbourhoods. You hear their stories. You read police reports. And you realize that depending on who you are, how much you earn and where you live in Flin Flon, crime can be a very real concern.
As this newspaper reported on Wednesday, the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics has released the 2014 crime statistics for Flin Flon.
Overall crime was up a negligible eight per cent. The real story was in how crimes categorized as violent shot up 46 per cent, or 54 offences.
I don’t want to oversell the meaning of that stat, as violent offences constituted just 17 per cent of all Flin Flon crime last year.
Further, not all “violent” crime is violent per se. Uttering threats, for example, is a troubling, scary offence, but it’s not actually “violent” unless the utterer follows through.
Still, the 171 violent offences reported in 2014 meant one such crime was committed every other day. And more than half of the violent-crime increase stemmed from assaults (fortunately, level-one assaults, which are the least severe kind).
Looking back between 2004 and 2014, only one year, 2012, saw more violent crime reported in Flin Flon. Compared to 2004, violent crime was up nearly one-third in 2014.
I’m sure you can blame some of this newfound violence on alcohol, drug deals gone bad, mental illness and all of the other usual suspects.
But at its core, I believe people are becoming more violent toward each other because we are losing the underlying respect that once formed the foundation of our communities.
As author and counsellor Dr. Alan D. Wolfelt writes in his 2005 book Companioning the Bereaved, “many people have lost a sense of community.” He reflects on the days when “People knew each other. People watched out for each other. People cared about each other.”
Flin Flon does not exist in a bubble. If the trend Wolfelt writes about is real, and I believe it is, then we too will experience it, at least to some degree.
When we lose respect for each other, it becomes easy to dehumanize those who bother or upset us in some way. This sets the stage for bad things to happen, and violence can be one of those bad things.
I still find Flin Flon to be a safe community, but I respect those who see things differently, whose shoes I have not walked in.
But if the pattern Wolfelt identifies carries on, I worry about the continued safety not only of our community, but also of all others.
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