Justifiable homicide up 79%
In Detroit, residents no longer rely on the police:
Justifiable homicide in the city shot up 79 percent in 2011 from the previous year, as citizens in the long-suffering city armed themselves and took matters into their own hands. The local rate of self-defense killings now stands 2,200 percent above the national average. Residents, unable to rely on a dwindling police force to keep them safe, are fighting back against the criminal scourge on their own. And they’re offering no apologies.
And private security firms are offering protection and doing routine patrols.
February 7th, 2012 at 10:32 am
Whoever thought that detroit would be a the test ground for libertarianism? weird.
February 7th, 2012 at 10:32 am
Love it.
February 7th, 2012 at 10:36 am
Of course, the fallacy here is that the police can be depended on to protect anyone in the first place. They’re there to draw a line around the body and investigate AFTER THE FACT.
February 7th, 2012 at 10:36 am
I really want to see the mayor try and explain this one… that could be amusing. Or horribly embarrassing…
February 7th, 2012 at 10:39 am
Interesting… everything old is new again. Triple S is back!
February 7th, 2012 at 10:54 am
Good.
February 7th, 2012 at 10:56 am
So when does Robocop show up?
February 7th, 2012 at 11:22 am
The only mayor who should have to explain this is the former mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea.
February 7th, 2012 at 11:31 am
Ah yes, De:toilet; the first third-world country inside the US borders…
February 7th, 2012 at 12:16 pm
Hey but remember “Justifiable Homicide” never happens and is just a fabrication of the Gun Industry ™!!111!!11
February 7th, 2012 at 12:17 pm
It’s now looking like Robocop was hopelessly optimistic.
A corporation WANTING to takeover and invest in Detroit?
Only way Delta city would happen now would be if OCP got a big fat bailout.
February 7th, 2012 at 1:05 pm
Is this what Clint meant about half-time and Detroit? America’s comin’ back! Take a two-minute warning and go to re-load?! And pray like Tebow that you don’t miss…
February 7th, 2012 at 2:54 pm
I like that the story begins by trumpeting a 79% increase in justifiable homicide while the story describes 19 such shootings in 2010 and 34 in 2011. Wow! 53 justifiable homicides in 24 months!
When I lived in Baltimore in the 1990s there was a murder a day downtown, just about one or so every day, for everal years as the Jamacian drug gangs removed the locals from the crack trade (IIRC). Hundreds and hundreds of murders each year, for several years running. So pardon me if I am not impressed at 4.5 dozen criminals dying over two years, who needed to be stopped by citizens exercising self defense.
A more interesting number would be the number of criminals who were justifiably shot by citizens, but who survived due to the excellent trauma care that develops in cities with lots of gunshot and stab wounds occurring among the criminal class.
February 7th, 2012 at 5:22 pm
Here’s a social experiment for you.
Take a depressed major metropolitan area with an unemployment rate nearly triple the national average. Now release thousands of prisoners into that area while drastically cutting back on your local law enforcement. What could go wrong?
Uhhh, ok that’s now working how are we going to fix it it? Oh yeah, this is how.
http://www.freep.com/article/20120207/NEWS03/202070380/2-accused-in-murder-of-80-year-old-Royal-Oak-woman-should-have-been-behind-bars?odyssey=tab%7Ctopnews%7Ctext%7CFRONTPAGE
February 7th, 2012 at 7:56 pm
Why rely on a government backed crimal organization? Cops are as bad or worse than any mob or gang member. With few exceptions.
February 8th, 2012 at 12:00 am
The ‘private security company’ mentioned ‘Threat Management” have a biohazard sign as their logo. They are also of the “High Speed, Low Drag” wanna-be types.. Shame, the owner of the company was/is a licensed private investigator in the state of Michigan.
February 8th, 2012 at 12:22 am
Must be a bitch to be a bad guy in Detroit.
February 8th, 2012 at 12:30 am
When the commitee hearings were held over Michigan’s “Castle Doctrine Laws” it was the contingent of State Reps from Detroit who opposed it the most. One of them told us he was afraid to codify the right to self defence because legal precedent made it uneccesary. A couple of them started to laugh out loud when someone was testifying in favor of the laws.
February 8th, 2012 at 10:24 am
“Deaths from self defense shootings” is an inappropriate metric for, well, anything. It is especially inappropriate for comparisons of citizen actions against criminals year over year, as it uses the absolute most unlikely event in a defensive gun use – death of a criminal – to characterize all defensive gun use.
Death occurs after a self defense shooting if and only if one of two things happens: the criminal who has been shot is DRT, dead right there immediately, before any response by EMS and medical treatment, or the criminal who has been shot dies later, after EMS arrives and after medical treatment. Same for anyone who is shot, stabbed, clubbed or otherwise injured actually. The number of justifiable homicides year to year thus results from many more factors than the number of criminals shot by citizens. Factors might include response time of EMS after a shooting, shot placement, calibers of firearms involved, size weight age and health of the criminals shot, number of shots hitting the criminal, the weather at the time of the shooting, the quality of medical care after a criminal arrives at an ER, the quality of surgery performed, the infection rate at the hospitals, and so on ad infinitum.
So deaths are not nearly as good an indicator for the actions of self defense shooters as, say, total criminal woundings + deaths , or reported defensive gun use, or criminals held by armed citizens for police.
Having the justifiable homicide number for a city of ~713,000 change over two years from 19 to 34 could indicate more shootings year over year. More likely it indicates the more recent crop of surgical residents in inner city ERs are not quite as good as those from the previous year, or the ambulance response time is slowing down.