40% less crime would do wonders for Detroit

[Strong]

I guess that if Detroit has about 40% less crime, 100,000 people would move here. People from across the metro area, statewide and nationally. It's just that Detroit has so much to offer.
This increase in population would heighten the tax revenues which would improve city services, the school system, beautify the neighborhoods and commercial districts which would increase the job and business opportunities.
Any thoughts?

[Wesley Mouch]

Detroit has tremendous possibilities. Its not as much the crime rate, as the nature. One must be reasonably safe in the course of normal activities before we'll see families investing in Detroit. Why are black families fleeing the city? Mostly crime.

That said, you have some other real issues like tax rates, city red-tape and stupidity, pathetic protected schools resistant to reform, just to name a few. Avoid single solutions.

[Jason]

I don't think there are that many people who want to move to Detroit but don't because of the crime.

Crime is a reason people leave the city but even if there was no crime, there's still the schools, the taxes and the city services.

And then even aside from those things, most of the city doesn't offer anything that the suburbs or other cities don't.

So I think those problems are deterents to the city's growth, but even if they were all gone you'd still need incentives to get people to move back in large numbers.

There's definitely interest in Detroit and there are plenty of people who want Detroit to be a place where they can live, but I don't think there's 100,000 people, unless you're talking about the very long term.

[313WX]

Fair enough STrong.

My question to you is, how you do propose we reduce Detroit's crime rate by 40%?

[cla1945]

If Snyder wants to raise my taxes to build jails, I'm all for it.

More jails, judges who do their jobs instead of flaunting their bodies to co-workers, or trying to screw the banks out of money for short sales, more cops on the street and all new leaders to govern honestly.

[MidTownMs]

I don't think people move anywhere for just one reason. There may be a main reason but certainly there are others. I moved back to Detroit in 1998 after I graduated from the U-M because I wanted to return to my community a make a difference which, in my opinion, I did. But after almost 15 years I left Detroit and the state of Michigan. Why did I leave? I left because I wanted live in a place where I did not have to leave my city just for basic things such as groceries, clothing, services, and other necessities that one needs to purchase on a regular basis. I wanted to live in a place where basic services such as police, fire, and ambulance response was the norm rather than the exception. I wanted to live in a place where my insurance premiums were not 4 times what other people pay just because I lived in Detroit. I wanted to live in a place where the elected officials put the needs of the citizens before their own personal needs, wants, and desires. Of course safety was an issue even though I moved from a relatively safe community it was still within the city of Detroit. Would I ever move back to Detroit? At the present time I can't come up with any reason why I would or should.

[renf]

Detroit appears to be attracting a moderate number of young highly skilled people who work, quite often, in the professions downtown or in the
medical centers near Midtown. Nevertheless, there is a widespread image that the is much crime in the city, that municipal services are deficient and that the public schools - with several exceptions - are not effective. Reducing crime would help but no one is very certain about why crime has fallen quite rapidly in New York and Washington but not in Chicago, Baltimore or Detroit.

[coracle]

Generalizing, it seems that cities/towns that manage to attract a higher percentage of white residents enjoy lower crime rates because they are not so good at it. So I think, Strong, in order to reduce the City Crime rates meaningfully long term it's a choice between attracting a greater racial mix and/or persuading the Criminals to go and live somewhere else where they can make a better living.

[Király]

40% less crime would do wonders for any city, no matter what level its current crime rate is at.

[TexasT]

And then even aside from those things, most of the city doesn't offer anything that the suburbs or other cities don't.

Ability to be able to buy a place near the core of a city. That's why I moved here from Chicago. I'm a city bird, always will be. Not interested in suburbs at all. I want to live in a city and I want to have a real house, not some shoebox for half a mil. That's what Detroit had to offer in my particular circumstances.

[mwilbert]

40% less crime would do wonders for any city, no matter what level its current crime rate is at.

I dont think so. My guess is that once it gets below a certain level, crime loses its salience in terms of people's thinking about cities. When people are choosing whether to live in Boston or New York or San Francisco, they aren't making that choice based upon crime rates. If they think about it at all, they think about it based upon whether a particular neighborhood is safe, not the overall city. I don't know if cutting Detroit crime 40% would do wonders [[to get crime down to the level of a "normal" big city would require a cut of more like 70%) but it couldn't hurt.

There are a couple of things that would be particularly beneficial. Getting Detroit out of the top five or ten cities for pretty much every category of lawlessness, particularly homicide, would probably help perceptions. Also, to the extent that property crime reductions might reduce insurance rates, that would be very visible and helpful. In any case, I'm in favor of it! If only my support were all that was required.

[Trumpeteer]

Does anyone else notice that "Strong" rarely ever engages in a thread once he's thrown the "thought" out for replies??

[jt1]

40% more jobs [[at all levels) would be even better. People focus on crime [[as well they should) but the reality is that there are no jobs available. No jobs equates to no hope. No hope results in continued lawlessness.

[corktownyuppie]

Crime statistics in NYC down 80% in 20 years, according to law professor from Berkley Law in book titled, ""The City That Became Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control."

New York's anticrime record has a lot to teach the nation. Over the past 20 years, the city has seen no major changes in the factors so often cited as the "root causes" of crime. Unemployed young men, single-parent families, educational problems, illegal drug use—they all remain. Other cities are now starting to implement policies similar to CompStat, and the preliminary indications are that New York's success is contagious. It's a new chapter for urban life in America.

Read more here at this publication frequented by banksters and aspiring banksters.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203806504577181291838644350.html

[GhettoHoodRat]

High Schools need to become dormitories...give mothers financial assistance in exchange for enrolling their sons in boarding schools that employ psychologists and then put them in military training...birth control should be provided for free to all residents of Detroit..spend the hundreds of millions on preventing more teenage babymamas instead of this train that goes up woodward which you will probably get mugged, stabbed, or shot waiting for it to come.

[coracle]

High Schools need to become dormitories...give mothers financial assistance in exchange for enrolling their sons in boarding schools that employ psychologists and then put them in military training...birth control should be provided for free to all residents of Detroit..spend the hundreds of millions on preventing more teenage babymamas instead of this train that goes up woodward which you will probably get mugged, stabbed, or shot waiting for it to come.

It sounds like a good basic idea; but it would be better to put the teenage potential babymamas in the dormitory schools with psychologists to persuade them not to have the sons in the first place. It would pay back dividends for many years after they hadn't had them. Eventually the Police may be able to return to eight hour shifts.

[MidTownMs]

High Schools need to become dormitories...give mothers financial assistance in exchange for enrolling their sons in boarding schools that employ psychologists and then put them in military training...birth control should be provided for free to all residents of Detroit..spend the hundreds of millions on preventing more teenage babymamas instead of this train that goes up woodward which you will probably get mugged, stabbed, or shot waiting for it to come.

Birth control is free....JUST SAY NO!!!

[Hermod]

Birth control is free....JUST SAY NO!!!

I always thought that common aspirin was great for birth control. A girl just puts one between her knees and as long as she does not drop the pill, she won't get pregnant.

[coracle]

Birth control is free....JUST SAY NO!!!

It isn't free. If you say "NO" you don't get the Entitlements.

[davewindsor]

Crime statistics in NYC down 80% in 20 years, according to law professor from Berkley Law in book titled, ""The City That Became Safe: New York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control."



Read more here at this publication frequented by banksters and aspiring banksters.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203806504577181291838644350.html

It's interesting to read the comments sections of this article. First, he doesn't cite where he gets those statistics from or how he arrived at it in the article. In the comments sections, it says he wrote it to create controversy to sell his book which is coming out next month and that you have to buy the book to find out how he arrived at those numbers.

Second, in the comments section, there's also mention of large scale illegal searches called "stop and frisk" used in NYC and that there is an unwritten rewards and promotion system for officers on reaching quotas to how many they do per month. After 9/11, NYC residents are more open to "stop and frisk" and police state tactics, but I'm not sure the average law abiding citizen in Detroit would put up with being randomly searched on the street on a regular basis by beat cops because they didn't share that level of tragedy like NYC residents did in their city.

Third, from the comments section, there's evidence that NYPD is manipulating crime statistics for compstat. Two years ago, a police officer named Adrian Schoolcraft at the 81st Brooklyn precinct began carrying around a digital sound recorder, secretly recording his colleagues and superiors. What he found was the the precinct was refusing to take major crime reports or downgrade them to minor crimes to manipulate the data for Compstat. http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-05-...precinct/full/

Several examples from the article, for example:

During a September 12, 2009, roll call, a fellow cop tells Schoolcraft: "A lot of 61s—if it's a robbery, they'll make it a petty larceny. I saw a 61, at T/P/O [time and place of occurrence], a civilian punched in the face, menaced with a gun, and his wallet was removed, and they wrote 'lost property.' "

The practice of downgrading crimes has been the NYPD's scandal-in-waiting for years. ... the Voice was told anecdotally of burglaries rejected if the victim didn't have receipts for the items stolen; of felony thefts turned into misdemeanor thefts by lowballing the value of the property; of robberies turned into assaults; of assaults turned into harassments.

Another example, "...a robbery complaint would be rejected if the victim was unable to come to the stationhouse. It didn't matter if a victim was unable to come down because he or she had to work or take care of kids. Perhaps not coincidentally, that would also be one less robbery to count against the precinct's crime statistics."

Other examples:

During the meeting, Schoolcraft provides documentation on an incident from December 5, 2008, that was initially taken as an attempted robbery—a teen reported that he was attacked by a gang of thugs who beat him and tried to take his portable video game—and later downgraded by a sergeant to an misdemeanor assault.
In the meeting, the QAD officers check their computer files and find that, indeed, the incident was classified as a misdemeanor assault.
Schoolcraft also provides documents from a June 29, 2009, auto theft report, in which the victim came in to obtain the report number, but no report existed. A sergeant told Schoolcraft to do a new report.

Schoolcraft tells the QAD officers that Mauriello came to the desk and told him, "I'm not taking this. Have the guy come in. I've gotta talk to him."
A couple of days later, the man arrived and was ushered into Mauriello's office. Mauriello interrogated the victim and his cousin. "There was yelling," Schoolcraft says. "They were in there for about 40 minutes. The cousin stormed out of the office yelling and screaming."
The stolen car complaint became an unlawful use of a motor vehicle, Schoolcraft said.
In another incident, an elderly man walked in off the street to report that someone had broken the lock on the cash box in his apartment and had stolen $22,000. When he reported the incident at another precinct, he was told that it was a "civil matter" and to call 3-1-1, the city's complaint hotline.
The desk sergeant told Schoolcraft to send the victim back to the other precinct because he was "loopy."


Among many other incidents Schoolcraft discussed were:

* A man walked in to report that he was choked unconscious and robbed of his wallet. He left with a slip that would allow him to renew his driver's license. Then, a detective came down and said, "If that guy comes back, don't let him upstairs."
* Another downgraded robbery from October 23, 2008: Two officers responded to a robbery and found a guy beaten up and bleeding. A lieutenant responded to the scene and said, "We can't take this robbery." It came in as a lost property.
Schoolcraft says he contacted the victim, who sent him a written statement detailing what had happened.

[oladub]

Anyone want to take a stab at what combination of carrot and stick incentives to apply to Detroit's fatherless feral youth to significantly reduce crime? All measures would have to be both legal and constitutional. Where does the money come from to do all of this? What could be done on existing budgets?

[Honky Tonk]

It's interesting to read the comments sections of this article. First, he doesn't cite where he gets those statistics from or how he arrived at it in the article. In the comments sections, it says he wrote it to create controversy to sell his book which is coming out next month and that you have to buy the book to find out how he arrived at those numbers.

Second, in the comments section, there's also mention of large scale illegal searches called "stop and frisk" used in NYC and that there is an unwritten rewards and promotion system for officers on reaching quotas to how many they do per month. After 9/11, NYC residents are more open to "stop and frisk" and police state tactics, but I'm not sure the average law abiding citizen in Detroit would put up with being randomly searched on the street on a regular basis by beat cops because they didn't share that level of tragedy like NYC residents did in their city.

Third, from the comments section, there's evidence that NYPD is manipulating crime statistics for compstat. Two years ago, a police officer named Adrian Schoolcraft at the 81st Brooklyn precinct began carrying around a digital sound recorder, secretly recording his colleagues and superiors. What he found was the the precinct was refusing to take major crime reports or downgrade them to minor crimes to manipulate the data for Compstat. http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-05-...precinct/full/

Several examples from the article, for example:

During a September 12, 2009, roll call, a fellow cop tells Schoolcraft: "A lot of 61s—if it's a robbery, they'll make it a petty larceny. I saw a 61, at T/P/O [time and place of occurrence], a civilian punched in the face, menaced with a gun, and his wallet was removed, and they wrote 'lost property.' "

The practice of downgrading crimes has been the NYPD's scandal-in-waiting for years. ... the Voice was told anecdotally of burglaries rejected if the victim didn't have receipts for the items stolen; of felony thefts turned into misdemeanor thefts by lowballing the value of the property; of robberies turned into assaults; of assaults turned into harassments.

Another example, "...a robbery complaint would be rejected if the victim was unable to come to the stationhouse. It didn't matter if a victim was unable to come down because he or she had to work or take care of kids. Perhaps not coincidentally, that would also be one less robbery to count against the precinct's crime statistics."

Other examples:

During the meeting, Schoolcraft provides documentation on an incident from December 5, 2008, that was initially taken as an attempted robbery—a teen reported that he was attacked by a gang of thugs who beat him and tried to take his portable video game—and later downgraded by a sergeant to an misdemeanor assault.
In the meeting, the QAD officers check their computer files and find that, indeed, the incident was classified as a misdemeanor assault.
Schoolcraft also provides documents from a June 29, 2009, auto theft report, in which the victim came in to obtain the report number, but no report existed. A sergeant told Schoolcraft to do a new report.

Schoolcraft tells the QAD officers that Mauriello came to the desk and told him, "I'm not taking this. Have the guy come in. I've gotta talk to him."
A couple of days later, the man arrived and was ushered into Mauriello's office. Mauriello interrogated the victim and his cousin. "There was yelling," Schoolcraft says. "They were in there for about 40 minutes. The cousin stormed out of the office yelling and screaming."
The stolen car complaint became an unlawful use of a motor vehicle, Schoolcraft said.
In another incident, an elderly man walked in off the street to report that someone had broken the lock on the cash box in his apartment and had stolen $22,000. When he reported the incident at another precinct, he was told that it was a "civil matter" and to call 3-1-1, the city's complaint hotline.
The desk sergeant told Schoolcraft to send the victim back to the other precinct because he was "loopy."


Among many other incidents Schoolcraft discussed were:

* A man walked in to report that he was choked unconscious and robbed of his wallet. He left with a slip that would allow him to renew his driver's license. Then, a detective came down and said, "If that guy comes back, don't let him upstairs."
* Another downgraded robbery from October 23, 2008: Two officers responded to a robbery and found a guy beaten up and bleeding. A lieutenant responded to the scene and said, "We can't take this robbery." It came in as a lost property.
Schoolcraft says he contacted the victim, who sent him a written statement detailing what had happened.

Though some of these seem harsh, I'm willing to bet this is S.O.P. with a lot of police departments, including Detroit. I had a friend who came out of a store to witness their rear window being smashed, contents removed, then into a waiting getaway car. [[save the "don't leave anything exposed" post please). They got the plate # and called DPD. First question was "do you have the serial # of the item?" "no, well we can't help you". Begs the question how many of those items would be in THAT particular vehicle?

[davewindsor]

Though some of these seem harsh, I'm willing to bet this is S.O.P. with a lot of police departments, including Detroit. I had a friend who came out of a store to witness their rear window being smashed, contents removed, then into a waiting getaway car. [[save the "don't leave anything exposed" post please). They got the plate # and called DPD. First question was "do you have the serial # of the item?" "no, well we can't help you". Begs the question how many of those items would be in THAT particular vehicle?

This is Standard Operating Procedure for the DPD? Sounds like BS. Do you have the officer's name or badge number who he allegedly spoke to? Did your friend report it to Fox news what the DPD did?

If the DPD is not at least writing up reports [[if their response times are so slow), why is the crime rate so high in Detroit? In order to report a high crime rate in this city, you have to be at least writing up reports of the crimes. They don't have Compstat in Detroit like NYC to disencourage officers from writing up reports.

From the article which he could back up, the officer uncovered that the NYPD wasn't writing up reports and when they did they were reporting most of them as a minor crimes--which is one of the reasons why NYC has seen such large drops in major crime rates.

[Honky Tonk]

This is Standard Operating Procedure for the DPD? Sounds like BS. Do you have the officer's name or badge number who he allegedly spoke to? Did your friend report it to Fox news what the DPD did?

If the DPD is not at least writing up reports [[if their response times are so slow), why is the crime rate so high in Detroit? In order to report a high crime rate in this city, you have to be at least writing up reports of the crimes. They don't have Compstat in Detroit like NYC to disencourage officers from writing up reports.

From the article which he could back up, the officer uncovered that the NYPD wasn't writing up reports and when they did they were reporting most of them as a minor crimes--which is one of the reasons why NYC has seen such large drops in major crime rates.

Wow, caught me. I made the whole thing up. [[rolls eyes) Would you like to see the $200 bill for replacing the rear window? You've obviously lived in Detroit for a while and have made and dealt with police reports before. Let me see, a dumb move by leaving the item exposed, more salt in the wound from the DPD, now let's add the icing to the cake, by pointing that out on local TV. Have you ever called FOX News, Dave? Do you honestly think they chase down every story everyone has? There's even more, but I'll spare you my fairy tales.

They don't have Compstat in Detroit like NYC to disencourage officers from writing up reports.

True, but they do have laziness and lack of concern.

[davewindsor]

Wow, caught me. I made the whole thing up. [[rolls eyes) Would you like to see the $200 bill for replacing the rear window? You've obviously lived in Detroit for a while and have made and dealt with police reports before. Let me see, a dumb move by leaving the item exposed, more salt in the wound from the DPD, now let's add the icing to the cake, by pointing that out on local TV. Have you ever called FOX News, Dave? Do you honestly think they chase down every story everyone has? There's even more, but I'll spare you my fairy tales.

They don't have Compstat in Detroit like NYC to disencourage officers from writing up reports.

True, but they do have laziness and lack of concern.

Yes, I would like to see the $200 bill for replacing the window, know the name of this fictional vehicle owner and the license plate number of the perps' vehicle because this story on the DPD's Standard Operating Procedure doesn't add up.

Yes, I think Fox news would chase this story down because the victim witnessed the crime, saw the perps do it, got their plate numbers down and when the victim called the DPD they refused to even write up a report because of DPD's "laziness" and "lack of concern".