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So what do we expect them to do from here?
Sure, many will go to jail for a while. They’ll sit in a county lockup for days or weeks or months. Some may do years in prison.
And we’ll pat ourselves on the back for a job well-done and convince ourselves we've taken an important step to “making change” in Detroit.
But as I watched vanload upon vanload of suspected criminals hauled away in Dec. 3 raids on a Jefferson Avenue apartment building and weeks earlier at the infamous Martin Luther King housing project, I had to wonder: What really will happen to all these people? And what does this law-enforcement theater mean for the communities they’re leaving behind?
More than 40 people were arrested in a multi-agency raid of the King Homes last Tuesday. Last month, more than 30 were taken into custody during a raid of a troubled apartment building on E. Jefferson.
All around metro Detroit, many rejoiced. News cameras captured residents cheering the police as they hauled away a gaggle of men away on charges such as asault to drug dealing to parole violations. Police Chief James Craig, desperate to redeem himself after being criticized for fleeing alleged carjackers earlier this year, seized on the media op to hector store owners and vow vengeance on petty crack dealers in too-big T-shirts.
Let's Speak Honestly and Precisely
And as a federal bankruptcy judge cleared the way for Kevyn Orr to turn Detroit into a rummage sale on the same day as the raid of the King complex, naive observers eagerly cast the bankruptcy and crackdowns as part and parcel of the same “help” that Detroit so sorely needs.
But if there’s anything I’ve learned from all the rhetoric about “saving” Detroit that’s thrown around, it’s that we don’t all agree on who or what constitutes the “Detroit” that we claim we so desperately want to rescue.
For some, “Detroit” is the sum total of its municipal assets. So when this crowd talks of “saving” Detroit, what they really mean is how can they protect the DIA from liquidation? How can they get control of Belle Isle and make money off of it? How can they profit from the city’s sclerotic lighting system? How can they best pimp Cobo Hall or a water department that they never built or invested in?
For others, Detroit is its people, the men and women and children who live and work here. And that doesn’t just mean those who are employed or educated or even necessarily law-abiding.
If when you say “Detroit,” you mean those people, then you can’t simply talk about making Detroit better only for the elderly or for the school children or for entrepreneurs and activists.
Impossible Employment Obstacles
In Detroit, the official unemployment rate is more than 17 percent. Among many young men and in many neighborhoods, that number is far higher. Many of these people have little work experience, less education and almost no hope of surmounting these obstacles.
"I have a serious issue with thinking we can just take folks off the street for a little while and everything will ultimately be OK."
But human beings are animals. And for any animal, self-preservation will always be paramount. The ignorant and ostracized get hungry and cold, same as the educated and socially favored would in their situations.
No, we cannot let criminals feed on our innocents — but neither can we pretend folks don't have to eat.
I have no problem with the crackdowns if they’re part of a larger, consistent strategy to not only fight crime, but improve the city's quality of life. But I have a serious issue with thinking we can just take folks off the street for a little while and everything will ultimately be OK.
If Detroit is to be “saved,” then surely that salvation has to extend to the worst off in our city, too. And it’s hard to offer a hand up when you’re too busy wagging your finger.
Deprivation and Desperation
We talk ad nauseum about the industrial changes that robbed Detroit of many of the low-skill, high-wage jobs that helped build the middle class. But we never seem to acknowledge the very real human toll of those shifts — and of our collective failure to adequately address the voids they created.
Sure, we’d have crime even if there were 100 percent employment. Humans are flawed that way.
But we cannot pretend as if the crime that threatens many of the city’s neighborhoods aren’t acts born of deprivation and desperation. We can’t callously watch people starve and then get indignant when they steal from the market or because we don’t particularly appreciate their style of theft.
I came of age at about the same time that the crack cocaine epidemic hit Detroit. Some dudes I played sandlot football with when I was 11 and 12 would, just three or four years later, join violent and notorious drug gangs.
I never sold a single rock. But I understood why the hustlers I knew did.
Locked Out of a Secure Future
Drug dealing didn’t flourish just because the city was overrun with a bunch of wanna-be teenage Tony Montanas. The dope game grew also because Ronald Reagan destroyed many of our summer job programs and job-training efforts like CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act). The dope game grew because those industrial changes that had created uncertainty for the adults before us left many (if not most) of us locked out of those low-skill, high-wage gigs.
The dope game grew at the same time and to the same degree that America's post-industrial interest in ending poverty, investing in urban centers and limiting the wealth gap began to wane.
Fast-forward 30-plus years and now even the city’s dope game has changed.
Trap houses still abound, as do illegal drugs — but a failed three-decade war on narcotics has largely decentralized the game and, thus, dispersed profits. Consequently, Detroit's dope game has also seen many of its workers take steep pay cuts, just as in many other industries.
And in an era when we’ve slashed social programs and demonized the poor, the neediest have become even more desperate. Poor teen girls are selling their bodies in frightening numbers. Drug abuse continues, albeit with fewer options for rehabilitation. Home invasions and carjackings are common.
Cannibalization of low-income communities has worsened. Where the high-profile violence of the '80s and '90s often centered on drug traffickers, the bloodshed we now pay most attention to seems to have become much more dispersed and “democratic.”
Address the Cycle, Not Just the Crimes
Don’t get me wrong: Detroit should never ever make peace with this kind of violence, not institutionally, not individually. The city does indeed have every obligation to protect its most vulnerable citizens, especially from criminals. Families in the King complex have as much right to a life free from violence and crime as families in Farmington Hills. (This is also one big reason I ardently support concealed-weapons laws.)
No, there is nothing at all wrong, and everything right, with telling criminals that they will not be permitted to prey upon innocent people or to turn housing complexes into a felon’s fantasyland.
But what goes up, generally crashes back down again, and the petty criminals we lock up usually get back out. Whether we “like” criminals or not, we cannot simply tolerate chronic unemployment among some groups and then tell those who turn to crime for relief to “just say no.”
We can’t have a city where we think the “help” we need equates to tax abatements for the rich and police raids on the poor.
Yes, it feels good to see residents of these apartments cheering as criminals are led out in cuffs. And yes, it does indeed inspire hope to think that children can now play in the courtyards of their complexes without fear of drug deals going sour nearby.
But the men and women arrested in those projects and apartment units, some of whom were themselves residents, eventually will come back home. What will all these ballyhooed crackdowns mean if they come home to the same old problems?
And even if they never do return, what of all those poverty-stricken kids who we so love to see playing outside in crumbling communities?
How do we best make sure that the poor children we ought to be improving the city for today don’t one day become the poor adults we accuse of ruining it all?
