A few comments on the riots

Last updated on: April 28, 2015 at 8:46 am by Jane the Actuary

A few comments on the riots 2015-04-28T08:46:57-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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So once again we have a city in chaos as originally-peaceful protests turn violent and the police seemingly turn their backs. Here’s The Economist for a quick summary, and further coverage from Reuters and AP. I don’t really have a sense yet of the severity of the whole thing, though we turned on CNN last night, which we don’t usually do, and my son* was most shocked by the report of someone cutting a hole in a fire hose being used to put out a fire. (*My 12-year old son; I had taken my youngest upstairs to read with him and tuck him in.)

Detroit, of course, had its own riot, in 1967, which accelerated, if it didn’t directly cause, the massive white flight from the city, two years before my family moved into the area, settling in Southfield, a suburb just to the north of 8 Mile Road. Would they have moved directly into the city otherwise? Probably not; they’re just not city kind of people. And our family’s economic fortunes were much more connected to the fate of the auto industry than with the city itself, though, heck, it would have been nice to have had some experience of city life other than sporadic and only faintly-remembered trips for a Greek Festival at Hart Plaza, or the Auto Show or, well, that’s pretty much all I can remember.

But I’ll tell you this: not only has there not been another riot, since then, but I can’t even conceive of a riot in Detroit happening again. I may be wrong, and any actual Detroiters (or suburbanites — SJ?) can correct me, but: heck, where would they riot? In the neighborhoods? At the corner grocery store? — for the most part, these are fairly heavily fortified. Would they gather downtown, where such progress as exists is so hard-fought? I just can’t conceive of a mob action, even as out of control as mobs are, ransacking a city which is already in such dire straights.

In Detroit, anyone with a lick of sense ought to know that if you destroy a building, the store owners aren’t going to just shrug it off, collect insurance money, and rebuild. They’ll leave. And any government or charitable help — well, that’d be at the cost of losing out on some kind of urban renewal project elsewhere.

And, to the best of my knowledge, there has in fact not been any riot since 1967, not on that scale, not on a smaller scale, either.

But is that any less true in Baltimore? Is it really worth a few packages of toilet paper, if your corner store closes down? Yes, I know it’s in the nature of riots that once the looting has started, participants take it for granted that destruction is going to happen, and they might as well join in and get their share of of toilet paper, or their thrills from setting fires that, heck, someone else would have set anyway. But — it’s my hunch anyway — I don’t think riots are inevitable, or an unpredictable force of nature.

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