D Spot has moved and transmogrified…

Hey folks.

As you have no doubt noticed, I haven’t been posting here for quite awhile. Been meaning t, but I guess the steam was just running out.

Anyway, I’ve decided to move this site to Posterous. The new site will be named Detroit Monster, and all the old posts have already been shifted over.

The new home is still incomplete right now, missing a few planks and some bricks, but I anticipate having it up and running within a couple weeks around mid-September, if not sooner. For all of you who have supported this blog in the past, many thanks. Hopefully you liked what you saw enough to follow the evolution. I think it’s gonna be some fun.

Easy.

Not that anybody cares, but murders are way down in Detroit

Naturally we, as Detroiters are neither amazed nor amused when at least slightly hopeful stories don’t manage to gain much traction beyond 8 Mile Road (that would be the barrier between city and suburbs for the uninitiated), but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still at least try to spread the good word whenever possible.

And when it comes to significant decreases in how many Detroiters are being murdered each year, then we need to do more than try. Because between last year and this year, according to a recent story reported in The Detroit News, Police Chief Warren Evans’ strategy appears to be doing exactly that. The fact that he is making this kind of an impact with so much less money and so many fewer officers than what he needs, is nothing short of remarkable.

“Detroit — It’s been nearly a year since Warren Evans took over as Detroit’s top cop, promising to use a proactive approach to fighting crime.

According to statistics released by the city last week, his methods seem to be working.

Homicides and nonfatal shootings in the city have plummeted, figures show, reflecting a national trend.

There were 140 homicides from the start of the year to Wednesday, a 27 percent reduction from the same period in 2009. Nonfatal shootings were down 22 percent during that period.“

Granted – and this cannot in any way be ignored – there have been widely reported concerns that the Detroit Police Gang Squad has been wreaking some serious neighborhood havoc in the midst of their efforts to curb violence. Gang Squad has been credited as being largely responsible for the steep drop in homicides, yet the level of citizen complaints against them is near astronomical. You might say it defeats the purpose of fighting crime if it comes at the expense of terrifying the residents. You’re not supposed to fear both the thugs and the cops.

Still,  although my heart aches for the recent and highly-publicized death of young Ayanna Jones, who was accidentally killed by Detroit police who were raiding her home to apprehend a murder suspect who was apparently being sheltered by the girl’s family (don’t ask, man, just don’t ask), I think this story of fewer murdered Detroiters just might deserve some attention too.

SHAMELESS PLUG: Check out my wife’s blog @ The “D” Spot Redeux.

Parents could be locked up for not being good parents

Just getting caught up on a few things here, and one of the top on my list is a story that appeared a couple weeks ago in the Detroit newspapers where Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy was suggesting that parents of schoolchildren who couldn’t make time to attend at least one parent teacher conference a year ought to pull some jail time. In other words, either you care about that damned kid or else.

Of course, one of the first questions I had about this proposal was, well, who’s gonna take care of the kids while the uncaring parent is behind bars for not caring enough? Just a thought.

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy is determined to make parents care about their kids. By any means necessary.

But then there’s another thought, because as easy – and tempting – as it is to rag on Worthy for trying to grandstand by even proposing something as ridiculous as  tossing parents into the big house for such a relatively lightweight offense (at least compared to the out-of-control murder rate) as missing a parent-teacher conference, I must admit I understand where she’s coming from. It’s highly doubtful Worthy will get much traction with this is my guess, if for no other reason than because the jails are already overloaded with much more serious threats to society. But that doesn’t mean the issue she is attempting to highlight isn’t more than deserving of a blindingly bright community spotlight.

Look, we’ve got the worst school system in the nation, and just last week the semi-illiterate president of the school board had to excuse himself for yankin on his johnson in front of the school superintendent. God knows I wish I were making this up but even my overly fertile imagination couldn’t grow bullshit this rich.

So these are the examples the elders are feeding their young, and that’s bad enough. Then you have those parents – not the majority by any stretch – who can’t seem to fit the welfare of their own kids onto their lazy-assed schedules. Maybe if it was programmed somewhere on the remote!

Anyway, I’d imagine someone like Worthy, who has to deal with the consequences of this crazily dysfunctional scenario everyday, some days becomes so insanely frustrated with it all that she begins to cook up ideas like this. Something. Jesus anything.

So, yeah, maybe it doesn’t stand a chance. True. But then again just maybe it takes something this ludicrous to get somebody’s attention. Because the first step toward a solution is to get somebody’s attention. By any means necessary.

On masturbating school board presidents and jailbird mayors

In Detroit we’ve got this bad habit of fretting over what everyone else thinks about us, as if who we are as a community depends on the judgment of others who may not have ever even been to this community except through the headlines. This habit usually kicks into high gear whenever another news story breaks highlighting yet another bizarre example of our dysfunction, such as a functionally illiterate president of the school board (now former president) who first decided maybe he should step down after it became public that he was playing with himself in a one-on-one business meeting with the superintendent – and then decided to try and retract that decision and keep his job. Or the equally bizarre example of another school board member who characterized his former colleague as a “young man” who just strayed a wee bit from the path of righteousness for an unsupervised moment and should have been given a second chance. Or the example of a former mayor, already in prison for one set of charges, now indicted on 19 counts of mail and wire fraud – for starters.

So then the question becomes, what do Detroiters think of Detroit right about now? Because we’re the ones that have to deal with this shit, up close and way too damned personal, day after day after day.

Dateline NBC’s Chris Hansen assassinates Detroit

I don’t guess anybody has ever referred to Dateline NBC as a ‘news’ program recently, at least not with a straight face, at least not for quite some time, so the more I’ve thought about it the more I’ve come to understand that this is most likely the reason why the producers of this show opted not to break any new ground when Dateline Big Dog reporter Chris Hansen aired his piece on Sunday night’s April 18 episode focused on the trials and tribulations of Detroit: “America Now: City of Heartbreak and Hope”.

Hansen has received all sorts of  glowing, gushing accolades for various reporting exploits throughout his career. The one most familiar to viewers  is his “To Catch a Predator” series of pieces which targeted online sexual predators. I always thought the series was more about Chris Hansen than it was about catching any predators, but maybe that’s just me. Anyway, he did win two Emmys for a piece he did in 2004 on child sex trafficking, so he does deserve some props I suppose.

Saying all this to say that when you take a glance at the guy’s track record you might get an initial sense that he is probably pretty good at what he does. And considering the fact that Hansen grew up in the Detroit area, there were some of us who made the fatal mistake of being hopeful that Homeboy Hansen might at least try to present a balanced portrait of what is going on with Detroit in his Sunday night piece. Because if that had happened then, truly, it would have been breaking news of epic proportions. Because no one ever reports the full story of Detroit.  Which is why, for the past 40 years, we have essentially been reading the same continuously looping story  that we have all gone to hell and there is no hope for us, the damned of the ‘D’. The ‘D’ is, in truth, Dante’s Inferno.

So even though I happen to know for a fact that Homeboy Hansen was led on a four-hour hand-held tour through Detroit by ARISE Detroit! President and founder Luther Keith, a tour which included the terrifying and appalling as well as the hopeful and the beautiful, Hansen just couldn’t bring himself to tell the whole story when all was said and done. Not even when he was presented face first, up close and personal, with both sides of the tale. Because the shocking and the horrid, after all, does offer much better visuals. Hell, why bother letting viewers meet middle and upper-middle class Detroiters who live in areas such as Rosedale Park, Palmer Woods, and Indian Village when you can show blasted out, boarded up catastrophes? Why interview the well-spoken when you can feature an elderly gentleman who shoots local  raccoons for food with a rifle and then sells the meat to his neighbors? I mean, seriously, which do you think makes for more entertaining viewing?

So I get it. After all this time it’s hard not to get it. Infotainment is the best you can hope for with most so-called television ‘news’ magazines. The nightly headline news isn’t much better, local or national. But even in the cotton candy realm of infotainment I would have thought that offering up something relatively new might have some appeal. But no. Instead what we get is Homeboy Hansen pasting a new wig on top of a 40-year-old headline and then labeling it intrepid journalism.

To say that the piece was a hit job would be accurate, but it still would not completely define the damage Hansen’s little urban  journalistic adventure has done to our city. Because who in their right minds would want to invest in the future of Detroit after seeing that? What Hansen did was willful and deliberate character assassination of an entire city. It’s slander. Hansen knows he and his camera crew possess the full story amidst the discarded ruins of their unused footage, but instead of writing the full story Hansen decided to construct his piece before he ever set foot in Detroit. Hansen planned this hit job well before his arrival, which begs the question why he bothered coming back ‘home’ in the first place? The man could have patched that crap together from past hit jobs – better done hit jobs – and then faxed that shit in from wherever he was on the road.

Because wherever you are today, Homeboy, there are a considerable number of us in Detroit who would prefer that you stay there and make it your ‘home’. Because if home truly is where the heart is, then it’s quite obvious your heart has been absent from the ‘D’ for quite some time. Go home, Chris. And stay there.

SHAMELESS PLUG: Read my wife’s blog @ The “D” Spot Redeux

U.S. hockey team battles Canada in the Olympic “Thrilla in Vanilla”

Some of you boxing fans may remember the Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier fight billed as “The Thrilla in Manila” (Ali vs. Frazier III). Well folks, I do believe we may finally have a follow-up battle complete with a whole skating rink full of  helmeted pugilists on ice. This afternoon millions of viewers (including this viewer who isn’t even a hockey fan)will be tuned in to  witness the U.S. battle the Canadians  for the Olympic gold medal in “The Thrilla in Vanilla”.

Think about it for a sec…

Rock 'em sock 'em hockey

“Thrilla in Vanilla”

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SHAMELESS PLUG: Read my wife’s blog @ The “D” Spot Redeux

Happy OSF! Romance dance songs

Man, there’s a LOT to choose from for this category. I’ve been running like crazy this week so I haven’t had enough time to research and reflect on this one as much as I would have liked. But one that just jumped straight at me outta te memory banks comes from my boy Rick James…

And Teena…

Lord.

Rick, Rick…

We miss ya boy.

SHAMELESS PLUG: Read my wife’s blog @ The “D” Spot Redeux

Strip clubs provide Detroit jobs too, Pastor Winans

After listening to the Michigan Chronicle’s Bankole Thompson yesterday on NPR’s “The Craig Fahle Show”, I gotta admit there isn’t much left for me to say about the Great Strip Club Debate in Detroit except to say, “Yeah. What he said.”

To hear the full discussion, I’m sure you can still check it out on WDET’s web site, but the overall point that both Bankole and Craig were making was the obvious one – or what should be obvious – namely that it is a hilarious embarrassment to see more than 500 folks show up at the Detroit City Council chambers to rant and rave one way or the other about strip clubs in Detroit when these same folks can’t even be located when it comes to so many far more important issues. The whole pseudo-moral argument being used by folks such as Pastor Marvin Winans to do everything possible to shut these clubs down is a joke, especially in a city with an unemployment rate approaching 50 percent.

Say what you will about strip clubs, the fact remains that they are legal and they provide jobs. In some instances, depending on the club, they provide well-paying jobs that far exceed the income any one of these workers might expect to make anywhere else. Keep in mind that these are not unemployed, frustrated nuclear physicists doing the stripping in these joints. These are, for the most part, women who are woefully unqualified for any other job that could pay them the same wages. That’s not the same as saying they don’t have the intelligence for other jobs, that’s saying they have not been provided the skills they need for better employment by our woefully underperforming Detroit Public Schools.  One of Bankole’s best lines during the interview was to suggest that perhaps the morally indignant pastors who want to erase strip clubs from the Detroit landscape might consider establishing a “redemption fund” to compensate all the displaced strip club workers who would be put out of work thanks to these soldiers of God who would gleefully deprive strip club workers of the means to pay their bills without providing them with any equivalent options to make up the slack.

I will concede that at some of these clubs there is definitely some illegal shit going on, and that’s no secret. But the whole point is to shut down the illegal behavior, forcing the establishment to play by the rules like all other businesses must do. Simply shutting them down – or imposing ridiculously punitive measures such as prohibiting alcohol on the premises – does nothing but shove the business underground just like the drug trade. Because strippers have been around for as long as calendars have been keeping track of days, months, and years. Strippers – and those who love watching them strip – are not going anywhere. Imposing reasonable legal restrictions upon – and collecting taxes from – these establishments seems to me to be the only sensible approach here. Because in Detroit’s current condition we damned sure can’t afford to pass by any spare change for the sake of Pastor Winans’ morals. Because even though he claims that Detroit deserves better than City Council’s decision not to follow his demands to the letter, the wonderful truth is that Pastor Winans does not now nor has he ever spoken for all of Detroit.

Praise God, and can I get an amen.

SHAMELESS PLUG: Read my wife’s blog @ The “D” Spot Redeux

Kwame Kilpatrick is Detroit’s curse

From a writer’s perspective – especially that of a journalist – Kwame Kilpatrick is without question the gift that keeps on giving. Last year he provided the Free Press with a Pulitzer, and this year it looks like the Tales of Kilpatrick will only be getting bigger and better. If Kilpatrick was the only story in town, he just might be the only story Detroit needed to keep the pundits well fed and the rest of the media fat, happy and belching from over consumption of spicy headline fodder.

So yeah, viewed from that perspective, I can only hope and pray that the disgraced former mayor just keeps on screwing up because his antics could provide me with enough material to create a blog created solely for the purpose of shining a light on the steadily expanding volume of this man’s bullshit.

But viewed from the perspective of a regular citizen who lives in the city and who only wants the city to function in the way that most normal cities do so that we can experience the actual thrill of living in a semi-normal city that can competently provide at least a modicum of city services that so many other cities take for granted? Viewed from that angle, there is no resemblance whatsoever between Kilpatrick and any sort of gift. This man is a curse.

The Curse of Detroit

I fully realize that the most recent stories coming to light about Kilpatrick allegedly running his office as a criminal enterprise are – for the moment – only allegations that have yet to be proven in court. Although the Feds are apparently strongly considering trying to net Kilpatrick under the RICO laws – laws used to sweep up notoriously corrupt and dangerous organizations such as the Mafia – that still hasn’t happened yet. And so, technically, at this point these are only stories that have appeared in the local media after breaking first in the Detroit Free Press. But I also don’t think it takes a legal scholar to figure out that if Kilpatrick has been under scrutiny by the Federal government for the past five years? That if the Feds have been working that long and that patiently to bring a case against Kilpatrick? And that if so many of Kilpatrick’s associates (and family members like Dear old Dad Bernard Kilpatrick) have also either been brought down already or are otherwise ensnared in this whole mess, then there is a rather strong likelihood that the House of Kilpatrick is about to fall. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not next month or even next year. But it most definitely is going down, and in flames.

And when that day does finally come, what will we do without him? Will Detroit finally be given permission to move forward without having to constantly be reminded every other day of the reason why our rear ends are so sore and we can’t walk upright? And once granted that permission by the (please God let it be so) disappearance of Kilpatrick from the headlines, will Detroit wipe him off the bottom of its shoe and begin walking in the direction of a brand new day? Will we maintain the fed-up spirit that tossed out the majority of our former city councilmembers that brought us nothing but embarrassment for so damned long?

Or will we miss him…?

SHAMELESS PLUG: Read my wife’s blog @ The “D” Spot Redeux

Detroit suffering death by property tax – or lack thereof

“It’s like we’re stuck in a local depression,” Roseville City Manager Stephen Truman said Monday. “The loss of property taxes is that staggering.”

Over the next two years, Roseville and other cities, townships and counties expect tax bases to drop by 20% or more.

—Detroit Free Press, Feb. 2, 2010

So then the question becomes, is that light at the end of the tunnel just one train, or is it the first of many to come?Whatever scraps of flesh that are still left quivering on the tracks after the first series of cars finishes running us over will surely be scraped clean by the long line of iron horse grim reapers coming behind for cleanup duty.

How the hell are we supposed to get out of this?

In Michigan – and in most other states as far as I know – property taxes are the lifeblood pumping through the veins of the entire economic system. Our public safety depends on property tax revenue, since it provides the bulk of funding for police and fire. Our public education system (such as it is, in Detroit) is dependent on our property tax revenue. So much of our local government is dependent on property tax revenue, which is why we’re starting to see various government offices shutting down on Fridays. Sure, there’s the haggling with the unions and all of that, but the reason behind the haggling is that the well is running dry, and the reason the well is running dry is because property tax revenue is running dry.

How the hell are we supposed to get out of this?

Here in Detroit, although Sheriff Warren Evans is said to be getting a pretty good handle on the crime issue, crime is still a serious issue that is a long way from being a Mission Accomplished. And unless something can be done to stem the tide of desperation, I suspect Sheriff Evans is soon to be up against something the size of which he will simply not have the resources to deal with. And that will be the day when all hell really will break loose.

As for the public schools? They’re  fucked up. It’s just that blunt, ugly, and to the point. There  really isn’t a more precise way to describe the current condition of our schools, except for a precious few. This is not to be misconstrued in any way as to imply that it is the kids who are fucked up because that is the farthest thing from the truth. The kids are doing their best to survive given the hellhole they have been left to sink or swim in by their good friends the Adults. It’s almost to the point where whatever the kids do, I have a hard time blaming them because, I mean, damn. How exactly would I act if everywhere I turned there was nothing to look at except for more evidence that nobody gives a good damn about what happens to me?

And yes, strange as it seems, this all does come back to the mundane issue of property taxes. I say ‘mundane’ because property taxes and declining  real estate values are not the kind of  ‘sexy’ issues like crime in the streets and mayhem in the schools, and yet they are precisely the issues that may have more to do with resolving these twin dilemmas than anything else. Because if we lose our tax base then we lose our economic foundation, and if we lose our economic foundation then the bottom falls out, and if the bottom falls out…

How the hell are we supposed to get out of this?

SHAMELESS PLUG: Read my wife’s blog @ The “D” Spot Redeux