someone asked me why detroit, despite the infamy, never had any of these race riot issues in 2016 or on the level they are now in 2020. people think you instantly die if you step into detroit but the city is mostly apathetic, depopulated, and blighted

when detroit's murder city reputation was earned, that was in the 1980s when the city's population was 1.2 million.

the current population of the city is around 670,000 people.

the peak population of the city was in the 1950s at 1.8 million people.

detroit was basically ahead of the curve and entered its own collapse. it's a city that's exhausted and depleted. it's so exhausted and depleted that its 80% black population not only elected a white mayor in 2013, it re-elected him in 2017. and he got on the ballot via write-in

it's a city where the defeat is palpable, no matter how much people say "it's coming back!"

it ain't coming back

but it has been slowly getting better and the people there are largely defensive of that and don't want more nonsense to start up because it's bad enough as it is

it also helps that the antifa types are spread out over a very large metropolitan area due to all of the white flight that occurred and the number of different colleges there are. some are in flint, some around wayne state/hamtramck areas, a lot of them in ann arbor and ypsilanti

the other reason is that frankly, too many people are just dead. this is the other aspect of being ahead of the curve. people who could leave the city did and people left to find jobs, but a lot of people did just end up dying in the crime waves or of drug overdoses.

there are neighborhoods that used to be streets full of people just a couple of decades ago and now there's only half or a third of the population left within them because of all the people who got shot or overdosed or houses burned down, as arson is the city's past-time.

basically the crime rate went down in detroit because there's no one left to kill

and for that reason, bizarrely, there are parts of detroit that are actually really safer than other cities because *there's no one left around*.

it's still bad, but it's bad in a way where they've accelerated past anyone even pretending that blm is viable in the city. the one limp-wristed attempt to create an autonomous zone was done by 43 people who were all arrested by the police.

it's just not taken seriously there