Detroit, the city with the most violent crime per capita in the US, has also now been ravaged by covid-19. Most of the residential neighborhoods in Detroit are fucking terrifying for ADULTS. These guys are cutting grass in public parks so poor kids have something to do. They should be applauded because poor kids will have a place to run around and laugh for the first time in months because of volunteers.
I have seen some comments here complaining about wildlife not having a place to live close to humans.
You know what else thrives in high grass? Ticks and rats. And if a lot is abandoned too long in Detroit there's a good chance it'll accumulate dead bodies.
Is any of this based on experience or just what you’ve heard? Because we have a friend rehabbing a large space downtown and while it sounds like things are weird, they don’t sound scary.
I have lived near Detroit for almost 1/2 a century. Downtown is one of the pockets that are nice. Detroit has nice pockets, the stuff in between is where you don't want your car to quit on you.
Detroit is a big city; like 140 square miles. The vast majority of that land are neighborhoods that are high crime. It's been that way for a long time. It is changing slowly but mostly around the afore mentioned pockets.
To be honest you sound like someone who lives in Sterling Heights that still thinks Detroit is dangerous, when it hasn't been that way in a long time. My wife and I regularly run around one of these "scary" neighborhoods (where we live) even at night in summer and we haven't been hassled in any shape or form for years.
I have been to hundreds of events in Detroit. I know the type you are talking about, I am not them, I love Detroit.
The unfortunate truth is there are 20,000 cities in the US and in 2018 Detroit ranked #3 for murder. Detroit has more murders than New York, Los Angeles and Chicago combined. You live in a dangerous city and it's not because I said so.
My guess is you guys are new to the city and you live in a nice pocket. That's great for the city, thank you. I used to 'run around' the city in the 80s when it was twice as violent and I too was never harassed because I too could afford to live and play in the nice areas.
Detroit absolutely doesn't have more homicides than Chicago, and I have no idea how you could have come to believe that. Detroit hasn't had more than 400 homicides in a year since 2007. Chicago hasn't had under 500 homicides per year since 2014 (over 800 in 2016), and we (I'm a homicide researcher in Chicago who grew up in Detroit, btw) haven't had fewer than 400 homicides per year since the 1960's.
If you meant per-capita, Detroit does have more homicides per capita than Chicago, LA, or NYC, but combining per-capita numbers doesn't really make sense/is misleading.
The original comment said "Detroit has more murders than New York, Los Angeles and Chicago combined".
They also said "Detroit, the city with the most violent crime per capita in the US"
These statements are false. Chicago has more murders than Detroit. St. Louis has a higher murder rate than Detroit. The person you are commenting on is correct.
I have no opinion on Detroit or crime rates in general. Just want to disagree that combining per-capita numbers is in some way misleading. Makes perfect sense for me and that is how I read the parent's comment -- combined and per-capita. Meant to illustrate the degree of the problem compared to other cities.
It works the same way as any other time a sentence like "A has a greater value in X than B, C and D combined" appears
-- to illustrate that A is significantly larger compared to its siblings in the set and its usually meant to be a surprising fact.
X can be a total, per capita or some other rate or whatever, it will depend on the context, as long as it's the same, it doesn't the affect the intent of the sentence.
To expand it further. I assume you don't consider below being misleading somehow:
Mary gets paid 90k per annum -- which is more than what both Jane and Jill receive per annum combined.
It's the same principle.
I guess I see now where confusion point seems for other people.
> If it's per capita, can't you just list every city that has a lower per-capita rate and claim that it is higher than all of them "combined"?
I can't, since that would be wrong, that basically not how I ever read and understand that sentence(if it has "combined" in it), I am not a native english speaker so I'm maybe wrong on this.
Mary gets paid 90k per annum, this is more than what Jane and Jill get per annum combined. I read it as:
Mary's per annum (90k) > Jane's per annum + Jill's per annum
Mary gets paid 90k per annum, this is more than what Jane and Jill get per annum. I read it as two separate comparisons:
Mary's per annum (90k) > Jane's per annum,
Mary's per annum (90k) > Jill's per annum
Salary per annum combines additively, that's fine. £10/yr + £20/yr = £30/yr, easy.
When you add 2 annual salaries you're not increasing the number of years that the salary is paid over.
Death rate per capita does not combine additively, that makes no sense. What would it even mean? 0.1 deaths per capita + 0.2 deaths per capita is not equal to 0.3 deaths per capita because the denominator changes.
The denominator changes because when you look at 2 cities together you don't just add the deaths (numerator), you also add the entire population (denominator).
If there are 100,000 people in city 1, with 5 deaths, and 100,000 people in city 2, with 10 deaths, then we have:
city 1: 5 deaths per 100,000
city 2: 10 deaths per 100,000
Adding them together, we don't get 15 deaths per 100,000! We get 15 deaths per 200,000 (because they each have 100k residents) = 7.5 deaths per 100,000.
I feel like I'm missing the joke here.
EDIT: I mean, yeah, literally, if you add the fractions together, you get what you wrote. But that's not a meaningful way to combine death rates.
Are you saying that if Chicago,LA,NYC have death rates of 23.14,7.01,3.39 per 100k, then the combined death rate of Chicago, LA, and NYC is 23.14 + 7.01 + 3.39 = 33.54 per 100k?
If that's what you're saying, then you're wrong, because the combined death rate of 3 cities would be the number of deaths across 3 cities divided by the number of people across 3 cities. It would not be the number of deaths per 100k in each city added together!
If that's not what you're saying, then I don't understand how it can be meaningful to compare those figures.
"Combined" is AFAIK not well defined. You are taking it as the (weighted) average, while I'm taking it as the sum.
As which of the two you take it is obviously very context dependent. If someone would ask you what the combined output of two factories per hour is, would you tell them the average?
I think it's a very meaningful comparison, as it highlights that there is a severely increased risk of dying of murder in Detroit. To put the same in a different framing: You could live one year in Chicago, one year in LA, one year in NYC and run a lower risk of being murdered than if you were living in Detroit for just one year. Of course this is just one small piece in the overall puzzle of mortality statistics, and might not have a big impact even at elevated levels, but that's a different topic.
Such "combined number of second, third, ... places" (= sum) figures are good at quickly highlighting that there must be something out of the ordinary happening, because a smallish deviation of a few percent can not be expressed as a sum of e.g. second and third place. There are of course some other problems with this method of comparing figures (e.g. bias - as a foreigner, I would have assumed a much higher murder rate for NYC), but there is nothing inherently wrong with comparing numbers this way.
The comparison with time is totally bogus because the amount of time does not change as you add more cities/factories.
If someone asked you the combined output of two factories per worker, would you tell them the sum?!
If the first factory produces 1 item per hour and the second factory produces 1 item per hour, then combined they are producing 2 items per hour. Agreed.
If the first factory produces 5 items with 1 worker and the second factory produces 5 items with 1 worker, then combined they're producing 5 items per worker, not 10 items per worker!
> The comparison with time is totally bogus because the amount of time does not change as you add more cities/factories.
But it does (when we are summing over the time axis)! We always had time built into the unit (deaths/100k people/year), so of course it makes sense to look at it in the context of time by applying specific values for them.
> If someone asked you the combined output of two factories per worker, would you tell them the sum?!
With that specific vague query, I'd probably ask a follow up question, as I assume that the person asking the question doesn't exactly know how to interpret the number, which is often the case if someone asks for "combined" and "per" in the same sentence. I've helped people build enough BI dashboards to spot when people try to avoid thinking about the data implications behind the operations they think they want to do, and "combine" is one of the top keywords for that.
> If the first factory produces 5 items with 1 worker and the second factory produces 5 items with 1 worker, then combined they're producing 5 items per worker, not 10 items per worker!
Factory 1 is producing 5 items/worker/hour, just as factory 2 is, so "combined" they are producing 10 items/hour, which is just as valid as your statement. As long as you are mindful with the units and the context, either way is fine.
Does Detroit have more homicides per capita than Los Angeles and St. Louis combined? Yeah, technically. Are you more likely to be murdered in Los Angeles and St. Louis combined? That's meaningless, as Los Angeles and St. Louis is not a relevant unit to that question.
I’d think the metric to look at with the signifier “anymore” would be crime in Detroit over time as there has been a massive drop over the years. I don’t read any implied comparison with other cities.
I always hear about these bad neighbourhoods and it sounds very interesting to me. So it's like, you can drive through one and get yelled at? Mugged? Carjacked? Shot?
Is it true and if yes, how is this possible, I wonder what's fundamentally different than Europe (I grew up in a poor country, I've lived in plenty of poor neighbourhoods, rarely had trouble beyond aggressive drunks and a few muggings). Or is everyone's life so sheltered that a gang of kids seems like nazis on parade?
In Europe (I'm in Portugal) there are bad neighbourhoods where 'normal' people don't go. Where even the paramedics only enter with a police escort and even police sometimes are scared to go there. Maybe not so many murders as guns are harder to come by (but shotguns for hunting/home defense are easier) but the chances of being mugged are high.
I lived in many places in Europe, all countries have these 'parts of town' but you just don't know much about them unless you live near one of them or know someone that works there (police, nurse, etc).
> I wonder what's fundamentally different than Europe
Nothing. There are neighborhoods in Limerick city in Ireland where the fire brigade only go with a police escort, because people were calling to report a fire and then attacking the fire engines. If you don’t think there are neighborhoods in Europe the police only go in large groups you’re wrong. There are many fewer but the US isn’t some alien planet.
Dunno about the rest of it, but I live in the country and can confirm that ticks thrive in high grass. #1 mitigation strategy is mowing. #2 is chickens.
Probably for the fun of potentially making that mistake, or just because it sounds cooler. Slightly relevant is that they're operating unsanctioned on public property, which is gang-related behavior if you squint real hard.
But I had the same mistake; I thought somehow a business consortium had spawned based on mowing rights/contracts, from the title
> instead of letting them grown removes one of the last remaining habitats for animals living close to humans
Clearly you've never owned a home with pest problems nor dealt with animals chewing the wiring harness on your vehicle or inhabiting its air intake circuit.
I'm all for conservation and limiting human population size but there's no sense in encouraging pests to live in/around your house and possessions.
What? That's just absurd. I live in a house with tall grass that gets mowed only once, in fall, and there is a absolutely no pest problem. Jest a sea of colorful flowers ans beautiful insects doing their thing minding their own business.
> What? That's just absurd. I live in a house with tall grass that gets mowed only once, in fall, and there is a absolutely no pest problem. Jest a sea of colorful flowers ans beautiful insects doing their thing minding their own business.
You're right, your sample of one clearly proves the absurdity of it.
I'd bet you don't live in the northeast, where deer ticks about this size: . carry Lyme and other dangerous diseases. Untamed wilderness is a beautiful and precious thing -- one which bears little
relation to your back yard (let alone an urban lot in Detroit).
its moved once a year to prevent bushes and trees from appearing. Maybe to simulate the wild fire that would briefly sweep over the meadow and clear the small dry plants in fall.
> The city itself will sell you individual house lots for $100.
Sounds like a great opportunity for all the wildlife proponents in this thread to do their share and create a natural reserve where they believe there should be one. That's far more productive than criticizing volunteers for mowig a lawn.
Yes, they also make parks unusable. Residential and commercial spaces are meant for humans. There is no need to even compromise for inclusion of animal habitats unless that area has some sort of endangered population. There is plenty of uncut vegetation in the rest of Michigan
> Ever seen children outside playing? It's anything but lame.
Where did children play before the invention of the lawn mower?
> Can city parks at least be "for humans"?
You mean, at least, besides the cities themselves, the parking lots, the industrial areas, the roads and highways, the suburbs. Yeah, at least. Poor humans. Give them at least the parks.
People don't have lawns because they are intensely interested in farming. They do it because they want a large, flat, soft area outside their house. You can't play badminton with bushes and flowers in the way.
That works up to a certain size. Beyond that it's just an anachronistic emulation of an aristocratic manor house with wealth displayed by all the hard working servants cutting an immaculate lawn by scythe.
Almost no one thinks of that when they think of lawns. They are admired by many because they are aesthetically pleasing to many, which incidentally is why they were maintained by the aristocrats in the first place.
Who are we to impose our aesthetic sensibilities on others.
My view is that the local people seem to prefer a park with cut grass, and these volunteers are helping them out. If the people want something else, they should decide.
I have seen some comments here complaining about wildlife not having a place to live close to humans.
You know what else thrives in high grass? Ticks and rats. And if a lot is abandoned too long in Detroit there's a good chance it'll accumulate dead bodies.
Screw your wildlife.