Detroit Really Is A Lawless, Corrupt, Broken S***Hole Of A City. Scary Vid.

[tombogan03884]

Ulmas, we've had this debate before and I laid out the historical facts backing my position, complete with refrences.
I'm not wasting my time doing it again.

[jnevis]

We always got a "hostile fire bonus" working Dispatch on New Years in Fresno.  There were more than one hole in the tops of peoples cars New Years Day.

[warhawke]

I lived in and around Detroit from 1966 to 2008 (with time out for the Army in 1984 and my trip to Europe in 1991). I drove an Armored car and worked security for 14 years. A lot of my families friends were cops and city workers back in the day as well, so I got a better perspective on a lot of the crap going on.
Detroit was run into the ground by a corrupt political system as long as I was there, with Colman and his cronies looting the city budget and running various criminal enterprises and then being replaced by inept people with better intentions (Archer) and thugs who thought they could do like Colman (Kilpatrick).
The real problem was Detroit was always divided into what were essentially ethnic enclaves. Black neighborhoods, Hispanic, Italian (my own 'hood), Polish, you name it. People always looked for what they could get for their area and screw the rest. The downtown area was what the city wanted to improve to make it a showpiece for the city. Everyone was out for themselves and figured that anything anybody else got was coming out of their hides. Colman was the master of playing off the various areas against one another to get reelected and to get more money from the state and Fed's, too much of which went into the pockets of him and his buds. The shift of whites out of the city reduced the ethnic diversity of the neighborhoods in the '70's and '80's but the neighborhood identities stayed. 
The unions, both the UAW as well as the city unions and whatnot played into the mess, mostly to increase their own power-base and fatten their wallets. The auto industry didn't care about anything but their profits as well, which is why they only did anything inside the city when they got huge incentives to do so.
The effect was to create a jumbled mess with each area fighting for what it could get, political power devolving into 'how much loot can we get' and the actual people in the neighborhoods not giving a damn about anything but what might happen in their own few square miles. The idea that people see themselves as 'Detroiters' except when one of the local sports franchises is playing is ridiculous. Ask a native where they are from and they will tell you which area they are from, Del-Ray, Dexter-Davidson, Downtown or Southwest, Northeast or whatever, which means nothing at all to anyone who is not a local.
The dependance on the automobile industry is again more a function of politics than reality. Most of the plants have been in the suburbs for years and the few workers who live in the city commute to work, the ones who didn't leave the city to escape the higher taxes and crime. GM headquarters might be in the Ren-Cen, but that is only because they got a huge deal from the city to move there. I laugh at the Chrysler commercials, they only have the Jefferson plant in the city since the Conner plant closed. They ought to say 'Assembled in Detroit and it's suburbs, from parts from Mexico, Canada and Thailand'.
The bottom line is that only a few real people care about the city as a whole and they are outnumbered by the people who just want what they can get for themselves or just want to get the hell out. The shift in demographics as new people enter the city to take advantage of the cheap real-estate and who have a vision for what the city could be might change this in the future, but I doubt it. The city would be much better off if they busted it up into 6 or 10 smaller cities (Detroit is huge geographically at 139 sq. miles) but of course that will never happen as the political parties do not want to have to spend more money on taking over a half-dozen cities when they can just win one election.
Detroit is doomed under the current conditions. The high taxes and corrupt nature of the cities political system will not allow real change politically and the isolationist nature of the neighborhood system will always pit the people against one another. Crime cannot be cured as long as the city maintains a monopoly on force and the police department itself is filled with budding politicians at the top and semi-reformed street-thugs at the bottom (I won't go into the dozens of examples of the cops being no more than an official street-gang but it is nothing but the truth and the few good cops can only keep their heads down and do their best).