Community activists Ron McMillan and Mark Porter are presenting a series of 10 personal-safety seminars they've titled, "Dodging Bullets." The first one is going down tonight at 6 at St. Therese's Little Flower Church at 5814 Euclid Avenue.
ain't even talkin' to each other about these things," McMillan says. "People walk
around here like they're at Worlds of Fun when these are dangerous
streets, there are home invasions, carjackings, drive-bys. I'm going
to try to make some folks understand that we gotta talk about safety,
and in talking about safety, we'll address our personal habits, our
careless habits. You see kids out here on their cell phones all the
time, but how many of them are talking about where they are, when they'll be
home, about making a plan? We're not prepared for living in peace and
nobody's teaching us any better."
What's especially scary, McMillan says, is when shooters aim into crowds of people, like the kind that congregate late at night after a party. "We create a lot of these situations," McMillan says.
"Evading getting shot, recognizing when we're in situations
that may be dangerous -- I was on Troost and Armour looking at what a
vendor was selling, and the next thing I know there's a guy running and
another guy leaning out his car window shooting at him. There were
bullets everywhere for about 15 seconds. It's traumatizing. One old
lady on the street had to sit down, she didn't know what to do. That's
what can happen in our streets, and we do need to know we have a social
contract to watch each other's backs and to know our children can be
safe in this community. We need to move towards prevention and not wait
for the police, they come after the fact."
McMillan and Porter
are funding the program out of their pockets and through donations from
inner-city churches, because they don't see the support from those paid
to protect us. "When the swine flu comes up, the federal government is
ready, yet only 15 or so people have actually died in the U.S. of swine
flu. [Note: the CDC reports 302 deaths from H1N1 in
the U.S. between April 15, 2009 and July 24, 2009, but McMillan's point
still stands.] But we're looking at 6,000 of our own youth murdered in
the streets [nationwide] and it's not important to anybody. We need a
federal crime task force to look at the bigger cities where these
murders are occurring, we can't just keep looking the other way."
Future "Dodging Bullets" seminars will occur throughout the urban core. We'll keep you posted.
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