Urban fright pervades, and not just on Devil’s Night

Urban Fright: New Year’s Eve in My Home Town

When you say scary, what holiday do you most… Urban Fright: New Year’s Eve in My Home Town

When you say scary, what holiday do you most often think of? Halloween? Devil’s Night? For most communities, the most dangerous and frightening of holidays is Halloween. You see lots of pranks, paintball attacks, broken windows and the like.

However, such is not the case in my neighborhood.

While most of my friends were out partying this New Year’s Eve, I worked until 11 p.m., and decided to just head home for a nice quiet night with my parents, a night full of Asti, video games, and my date for the night, Dick Clark.

It was a busy night at the hospital where I work, and I joked about not wanting to stay past my shift for fear of getting shot at while coming home. The sad thing is, I was serious. My mother is the president and dispatcher for our city’s Crime Resistance Committee, so she had her police scanner on.

Sure enough, right after the big ball dropped up in Times Square, we began hearing calls for shots fired on almost every street in the lower part of town. We laughed them off, half expecting to hear these calls throughout the night. We went about our business, watching television and, later, playing Mario Party 5, until a little before 1:30 a.m.

All of the sudden, we heard a call come over the scanner about our neighbors having a drunken man pounding on their door. Out of nowhere, we heard shouts and pounding footsteps outside our house. Within a few minutes, we heard sirens, saw lights, and heard screeching tires as every officer on duty showed up to arrest the drunken man pounding on people’s doors.

We observed the man pinned on the lawn of our 90-year-old neighbor’s house, and couldn’t believe this was happening at 1:30 in the morning. We later found out the man also tried to jump our 5-foot chain link fence, which would have been entertaining. Personally, I would like to have seen him start knocking on our door. It would have been amusing. I think my little toy fox terrier would have had fun with him.

As much as I wish I could chalk this activity up to New Year’s drunken celebrations, the sad reality is this is the norm in my hometown. In my city, helpful has a different meaning. The other night, I came home to find that an abandoned, stolen car was left in front of my driveway, hot-wired with the radio stolen. It’s the third stolen car we’ve found parked there. This past summer, one youth generously air-conditioned our living room by throwing a brick through our front window.

The best is the helpful painting crew. Each year, they charitably paint our house for us on Devil’s Night, colors like hot pink, blue, yellow, and green. Yes, that’s right. We get paintballed every single year.

This seems to be the plight of many urban areas these days. As the cities get poorer, the conditions of the towns deteriorate just as quickly as their finances. With each generation, the towns get more and more depreciated. Their education systems have deteriorated, the streets have become war zones, and the citizens, for the most part, don’t seem to care. It’s a socioeconomic problem that will not go away. It’s occurring more and more in today’s world.

The City of Pittsburgh is an example. Once a fine, prospering steel city, it is now a city in financial distress. It is only a matter of time before the budget, which includes the laying off of almost the entire Police Academy class of 2002 that had been employed by the city, causes Pittsburgh streets to resemble the ghetto I call my hometown.

I wish I could suggest a solution. The only thing citizens can do is quit being apathetic. Don’t let crime take over your town. I doubt you want to look out your front window next New Year’s Eve and see someone pinned down with badges staring at him or her. I sure don’t.

Daveen Rae Kurutz is a columnist for The Pitt News.