Detroit City Is the Place to Be (11 page)

A female blues singer whose name I didn’t catch had told the crowd to “put some cotton in the children’s ears” before launching into a song called “I’m a Dirty Old Woman with a Dirty Mind.” You wouldn’t have heard that, Lafayette Park, nor would you have caught that cherry red ’66 GTO driving down Forest or have had the following exchange with the guy standing next to you in the leather vest and dark glasses:

G
UY IN
L
EATHER
V
EST:
Man, I used to have that
exact
car!

M
E:
What happened?

G
UY IN
L
EATHER
V
EST:
They stole it! Don’t mean no disrespect, but
white boys
stole it.

M
Y FRIEND
B
ILL:
Some of us are dicks.

M
E:
Ever find it?

G
UY IN
L
EATHER
V
EST:
In Detroit?
Shit
.

Later, Harmonica Shaw took the stage with a sort of gunslinger’s belt strapped around his middle, only the belt had different harmonicas. It would have been a shame to miss that.

Neighborhood watch leader James “Jack Rabbit” Jackson, a retired Detroit police officer living on the city’s east side.
[John Carlisle]

4

NOT FOR US THE TAME ENJOYMENT

I
F YOU WERE TO
make the five-minute walk east from Mark Covington’s Georgia Street Community Garden to Gratiot Avenue, then turn north and stroll a single block, you would reach the Slumberland Child Development Center. In a city of haunted ruins, it takes special élan to stand out as an unusually haunted ruin. For the Slumberland Child Development Center, the crude mural featuring Mickey Mouse and the Tasmanian Devil provides that extra boost, especially if you live in the neighborhood and happen to know the recent history of the place—how, in 2009 and again in 2010, the former day care center was used to hide the cadavers of murder victims. Including the two Slumberland corpses, the bodies of eight women were discovered in the immediate vicinity over the same time period. Two years on, there had been no arrests in connection with the killings. In one of the local articles on the case, a resident wondered if the neighborhood was becoming a “mecca for dumping bodies.”

Though his community garden earns most of the attention, Covington also serves as vice president of a group called the City Airport Renaissance Association. As the body count piled up, the members of CARA, dedicated to stabilizing what remained of their neighborhood—called “City Airport” because of its proximity to the barely used Coleman A. Young Municipal Airport,
1
which for years has handled only cargo and the occasional private commercial traffic—began knocking on doors and distributing flyers warning residents of the killings.

If you ask a Detroiter about saving the city, it’s unlikely that she will mention tech start-ups or urban farming. The first thing most Detroiters want to talk about is crime.

*   *   *

I was robbed at gunpoint when I was twenty, just a short walk from Service Street. A group of us had decided to drive from Ann Arbor, where I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, to Greektown, one of the few parts of downtown Detroit that can pass for a shlocky tourist zone in a regular, fully operational city. I rode with Jill, a friend of a friend I’d just met that night. We parked and entered the stairwell of the parking structure. Hiding on the other side of the door was a man with a gun. He hissed for us to look away from his face and hand over our money, in that order. I remember giving him my wallet and, bizarrely, clenching my stomach, as if preparing to take a punch. That was where he’d pointed the gun. Then, to my horror, Jill began arguing about having to give up her purse, which, she insisted, was a gift from her grandmother; it had “sentimental value.”

“What you got in here, bitch?” the mugger wanted to know, suspicious, as he rifled through her bag. I did my best to telepathically signal that I’d just met this young woman and had no sentimental attachment to her. Eventually, he thrust the purse back into her hands. I couldn’t tell if he was disgusted by her audacity or filled with a strange respect. Then he let us go.

Moments after we staggered out of the stairwell, Jill burst into tears, and I felt obligated to put my arm around her and comfort her, even though she’d endangered our lives for her stupid purse.

*   *   *

As urban pathologies go, crime as an issue can feel prosaic. The problem is fairly similar—specific stats aside—from one inner-city neighborhood to the next, even if the first happens to be in New Orleans and the second in East Brooklyn. What makes Detroit’s crime situation particularly interesting is not the crime itself but the civilian response.

Along with groups like CARA and organized anticrime patrols like the Detroit 300, private citizens, in do-it-yourself Detroit fashion, attempted to fill the void left by the hobbled police department, which possessed one of the worst 911 response times in the country. (Thirty-four minutes in 2009—and that was for priority calls, as in, “A burglar is climbing through my bedroom window right now!” Nonpriority callers could expect waits closer to an hour.) Not coincidentally, metro Detroit accounted for 43 percent of all concealed weapons permits issued in the entire state of Michigan.

It could get sort of crazy. A few days after the new city council was elected in the fall of 2009, it was reported that five of its nine members had CCW (carry a concealed weapon) permits and regularly carried firearms. Around the same time, a robber made the mistake of breaking into the Westside Bible Church—where he was promptly shot by the pastor. A resourceful AP reporter had followed up on the gunslinging minister story by conducting a quick poll of Detroit churches and managed to turn up a number of other armed men of the cloth, including Holy Hope Heritage’s Rev. William Revely, who admitted to occasionally preaching while wearing his .357 (and who kept in practice by target shooting at a gun range with a fellow pastor), and Greater Grace Temple’s Bishop Charles Ellis III, who insisted he didn’t wear his concealed weapon during services, but then again, he didn’t have to, as the church had its own armed, eighteen-member Ministry of Defense present at all major functions. Speaking to the AP, Revely remained unapologetic: “I’ve always felt that the only way to handle a bear in a bear meeting is to have something you can handle a bear with.”

The police could be just as nonchalant about gun ownership. One time, John Carlisle—“Detroitblogger John”—took me to Club Thunderbolt, a strip club run by a guy named Jay out of his dead parents’ house, in one of the worst neighborhoods in the city. Jay had been shot in the face when he was eleven. (Now in his forties, he looked as if he’d recently suffered a stroke.) He showed me around the house, the butt of a pistol sticking out of the back of his pants, eventually leading me upstairs to his “War Room,” which contained a stack of cardboard boxes. “Brand new AK-47 here, and 10,000 rounds of ammo,” he said, patting one of the boxes. Then he leaned into the open doorway of his bedroom and emerged holding a double-barreled shotgun. “I’ve always got this ready to go,” he said. “I sleep with numerous weapons.” I could see a pair of nunchucks and a crossbow hanging above his bed, and there was a Kevlar vest hanging closer to the door. “You really don’t want to fuck with me,” Jay continued. “Shit, with the police here? I could dig a hole in the backyard and nobody would know. I saw a cop car seven days ago. And I saw a sheriff at the gas station yesterday. That’s
it,
in this neighborhood, in a week.”

Jay told me that he’d been sitting in bed one night, watching Jay Leno, and he’d heard a burglar creeping up the stairs. He grabbed his shotgun and chased the man outside, firing at him through the door.

“I shot high, because I didn’t want to kill somebody,” Jay said.

A cop showed up five-and-a-half hours after Jay called 911. When the officer arrived, he told Jay, “Next time, aim lower.”

*   *   *

To obtain a CCW permit in Michigan, one must first complete a gun safety and proficiency class with someone like Rick Ector, the proprietor of Rick’s Firearm Academy, who was quoted in the AP story. Ector said he’d taught pastors and “people from all walks of life.” As he explained it, “Detroit is not a very safe place.”

On Ector’s website, he’d splashed across the top of the page: “If You Live, Work, or Play in Detroit, You Need a CCW/ CPL!” Below this imperative, visitors could scroll through such statements as:

Detroit is the most violent city in the USA.

Each and every single day within the Detroit city limits one (1) person will be murdered, two (2) people will be forcibly raped, nineteen (19) people will be robbed, and thirty-six (36) people will be victims of an aggravated assault.
2
(Be advised that these numbers only reflect crimes that were reported; criminals, as a rule, do not report crimes committed against them.)

I was surprised to discover, via the website, that Ector was African American. In a case of reverse stereotyping, I’d always considered this specific type of right-to-bear-arms proselytizing as distinctly Caucasian behavior. Curious, I gave Ector a call, and he invited me to take a class. The next one would take place on a Sunday, in the bland conference room of a suburban hotel located on a freeway service drive, beginning at 8:00 a.m. sharp.

There were nine other students, six of them women, everyone black but for a towheaded, Polish-accented man who looked about six foot five. Pastel watercolors (floral bouquet, covered bridge) adorned the thin walls. Ector stood at the front of the room, forty-two years old, fit, conservatively dressed (blue slacks, tucked dress shirt), with short hair and a five o’clock shadow. By day, he worked as a systems analyst for a company whose major client was one of the Big Three auto companies.

Ector’s pedagogical style seemed the product of a Dale Carnegie–inspired handbook on effective public speaking. He projected his crisply enunciated words toward the back of the room and made deliberate eye contact with each of his students, occasionally underlining a point with a sudden and intense grin. Unlike Carnegie, Ector was wearing a pair of bulky handguns, visibly holstered on either hip, which made his telegraphed confidence appear sinister and slightly unhinged. (There is something unnerving about a motivational speaker whose motivational purpose is to convince you to carry a weapon and understand precisely when it is legal under state law to use that weapon to kill.) Ector told the class the reason to carry two weapons was so you’d have a backup in case one of the guns misfired.

Among the other students, there was one young couple, a paunchy retirement-aged man wearing a UAW cap, and a compact, fussily made-up woman in a camouflage Detroit Tigers cap. The woman had brought along her own handgun in a black carrying case. Seated directly beside me, a pretty, broad-faced woman with a regal posture took copious notes on a yellow legal pad. Even the students who didn’t take notes listened raptly as Ector worked his central thesis: the crucial necessity of constant vigilance and hyperawareness of one’s surroundings, sleep being the only exemption. If you’re a heavy sleeper, Ector recommended buying a dog.

Ector laid out a number of “be aware” scenarios where a crime might occur. Some seemed universally applicable (a car following you home), others specific to Detroit (a car stopping next to yours at a red light after dark). Whenever Ector wanted to emphasize a point, he narrowed one end of his mouth and cocked it sharply, at the same time puffing his cheek and making a clicking noise with his tongue.

The class covered practical gun-related concerns—the pluses and minuses of various-calibered handguns,
3
the inefficiency of certain pistols, how the difference between store-bought and home-swaged bullets was akin to the difference between an off-the-rack and a custom suit (perhaps as a nod to the number of women in the room, Ector noted he typically pressed his bullets while watching
Oprah
), and how hollow-point bullets tended to “solve the penetration problem.”

“At what point does someone stop being a threat to you?” Ector asked the class.

A woman in a faded teal sweatshirt raised her hand. The effort seemed to exhaust her. “When they can’t move?” she asked.

“You shoot until he stops!” Ector shouted, his eyes flashing as if lit up by gunpowder. Lowering his voice, he continued, “You may have to shoot a person more than once. You may have to shoot a person
a lot
of times. It’s getting colder, so people wear a lot of clothes. A person might be high on drugs.”

His voice turning grave, Ector told us it was better not to carry a gun at all than to have one and not be prepared to pull the trigger.

“Do you have it in you to defend yourself?” he asked. “Or would you pull out your gun and wave it around and hope they magically disappear?” The “they” referred to a would-be assailant. He paused, arranging his face into a disgusted look, before continuing, “This is ripped from the headlines: what if your assailant is twelve years old?” A few months earlier, a twelve-year-old boy had, indeed, been arrested in Detroit for murder, after shooting a young woman during an attempted carjacking.