Columbus residents and its visitors suffered through an astonishing 10 separate shooting incidents while the city hosted visitors for the Kayak World Cup between Friday, September 30, and Sunday, October 9, 2022.
The shootings occurred while both Phenix City, Ala. and Columbus, Ga. intended to show the world their best during the tourism event, though extremely low attendance may have helped the sister cities conceal the rampant violence that occurred.
The shooting incidents were as follows:
Uptown Columbus, Inc., the nonprofit owner of RushSouth Whitewater Park and hosting organization for the event, also accidentally leaked in early September that the kayak event was expected to be a financial loss for the organization.
Empty grandstands and only a hundred-or-so people were present throughout the entire grounds of the event during its peak hours of competition on the afternoons of Saturday, October 8, and Sunday, October 9, 2022. Those present consisted almost entirely of the athletes themselves and their families.
Local news channels did not choose to cover the event while competition was underway.
While extra overflow parking lots were set up in anticipation of thousands of attendees, local street parking remained readily available across the street from the event’s grounds.
Wayfinding signs and posters were visible more than a half-mile away, though the downtown area remained just as empty as any other typical weekend afternoon.
While Columbus continues to focus its time, money, and effort on its so-called “tourism” initiatives, the city continues to fall further behind its peers in terms of crime, poverty, and drug use as its population also begins to decline.
The city of Columbus has experienced no less than 33 homicides so far this year, with six of those occurring in September alone.
With a population of only roughly 205,000 people in 2021, the city experienced an unprecedented 70 homicides last year at a rate of more than 34 per hundred-thousand residents — five times the national average that same year. While homicides themselves have so far decreased in 2022, the number of shooting incidents as a whole appear to have staggeringly increased.
In addition to its rising rates of violent crime, Columbus continues to show other major symptoms of urban decay; its population declined by roughly 1,300 residents from 2020 to 2021, while its poverty rate rose from 20% to 22% over the same time period. Drug overdose deaths also doubled from 2020 to 2021 within Muscogee County.
The rising symptoms of urban decay continue to raise questions on how the city continues to deplete its resources in an attempt to bring tourists to the objectively declining city.
Facts are stubborn things — and we’ll keep publishing them, whether city officials like them or not.
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