Crime problem makes city itself a crime victim - Columbus Ledger-Enquirer

Crime, especially violent crime, is ugly by definition. By any definition, the crime numbers we’ve just seen for Columbus are hideous.

The FBI uniform crime reports for 2015 (the latest year for which full numbers are available), provided by Greater Columbus Chamber of Commerce CEO Brian Anderson and reported by staff writer Alva James-Johnson, are impossible to downplay.

There’s no upbeat spinning of this reality, no lipsticking this pig.

It’s not as if anybody needed to be told Columbus has a crime problem. We’ve known that for a long time, anecdotally and otherwise. But the dimensions of it, put in the context of state and national crime rates, are stunning.

As reported in James-Johnson’s story, the Columbus crime rate was recorded as more than double the national average and 79 percent higher than the state average. Property crime rates were especially off the charts here — 83 percent higher than the state rate and 123 percent above the national.

In violent crime, the worst category of them all, the rate in Columbus in 2015 was 47 percent higher than the state average and 49 percent higher than the national average.

And that was in a year when the total number of crimes had decreased from the year before — which, as the story noted, still left us less safe in terms of crime than almost four-fifths of the other cities in Georgia and almost 90 percent of other cities in the United States.

The purely human costs of such a plague are of course tragic and staggering; but there are huge practical costs as well. Which is why the issue has been of major and growing concern to the chamber and local business leaders. As Anderson told James-Johnson, a team of business site selection consultants recently graded the city on its economic development prospects: “They gave us all good, high marks in many, many areas, and then turned around and basically said, ‘Your crime numbers, if anybody does research on your community based on what they can get off the Internet, you could get d-listed for projects because your crime number is so high.’”

As the chamber and area business leaders embark on the ambitious and visionary Columbus 2025 project to grow the economy, reduce poverty and increase prosperity for the region, that is not a prognosis they want to hear.

Anderson, like so many others, believes (and he’s demonstrably right) that things like job training, economic growth and employment opportunity are the best antidote to drugs and crime. It’s a Catch-22: Crime threatens to stymie the very things most likely to reduce crime.

Changing that pattern of criminality and futility isn’t an impossible task, but it will be a complex and grueling one. Anderson said it’s going to require a “more elevated conversation” to figure out “what’s going on, where can efforts be made, and who’s supposed to do it.” That’s a discussion we all need to be in on.

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