Quote Originally Posted by renf View Post
T...snip...
Detroit is the only border city with a high homicide rate.
Does anyone know why the homicide rates in cities including New York, El Paso and San Diego are so very much lower than the slowly declining rate in Detroit?
NY, EP, and SD are not peer cities. NY has neighborhoods that might be peers, but when you add up all the diverse things that are NYC, its murder rate is meaningless. You might want to compare NYC to Detroit's SMSA -- and maybe that'd have some relevance.

EP & SD are border towns, yes. SD yes, but not really. But they are smaller than Detroit, and have entirely different social pathologies driving their crime.

Detroit's peer cities here are rust-belt towns. Cleveland, St. Louis, Buffalo, Milwaukee. You might even want to look at smaller decaying industrial powerhouses such as Gary or Youngstown [[OH). Those peers may point you to something.

Its a great question. What made Detroit fail? Its the subject of another thread, 'Root Causes...'. Detroit seems to have failed more thoroughly than any other American city. Border town effect? Probably small here. But a great question. Why Detroit? Why so bad? What is it about Detroit that made its failure worse than Clevelands -- although they failed pretty well too. How does their murder rate track to Detroit?