Guy Gordon (00:00.558)
Hello and welcome once again to another hashtag Facts Matter Podcast brought to you by the Citizens Research Council of Michigan. Today we look at crime, really our third in a series of looks at crime in the city of Detroit, the trends, and also where we’re headed relative to pure cities, how we’re doing to the rest of the universe by comparison. We bring in Doug Ortiz. He is the
director of the Detroit Bureau for the CRC and he crunches the FBI crime statistics and gives us this analysis. Doug, hello. So we we looked at violent crime. We’ve kind of set up in in other podcasts the methodology that you use. We’re kind of going to go over that again, but today we look at property crimes. If as we look into that basket, what kind of crimes are we talking about?
Doug Ortiz (00:31.774)
Good morning.
Doug Ortiz (00:45.97)
talking about larcenies, larcenies involve theft versus burglaries that involve usually use of force. So larceny is basically theft without use of force. And also motor vehicle thefts.
Guy Gordon (00:56.118)
Or break ins.
Guy Gordon (01:03.54)
Okay, so remind me we we do the analysis, we break it down in terms of rate by population by one hundred thousand residents, to give a more objective rate and and so we can have an apples to apples comparison, but we also do this in comparison to peer cities. Who are our peer cities and how did you choose them?
Doug Ortiz (01:27.412)
So our peer cities are Milwaukee, Newark, Buffalo, Rochester, Toledo, and Cleveland. And we choose them using objective criteria that influences crime in urban areas. So that includes population size, median household income, poverty level, and low and employment levels.
Guy Gordon (01:49.902)
Okay. So kind of to give some context, so we’re not comparing ourselves to say a Sunshine State or some other locale that we have little in common with. These are mostly urban manufacturing centers in the Midwest.
Doug Ortiz (02:06.667)
And some in the east. Yeah, rust rest largely, I would say.
Guy Gordon (02:08.863)
Into some of these Yeah, Rochester being Yes, you’ve also managed to include a lot of cities that have a load of snow, which can also, I’m sure, is a a determinant in crime. just because it builds anger. We know that property crimes that we’re discussing today are much more common than violent crime, thank goodness. When we look at the the the population of Detroit, how often is the average Detroiter touched by that kind of crime?
Doug Ortiz (02:39.709)
What so according to the Detroit Metro Area Community Survey, it’s a representative survey of Detroiter opinions. in in 2021, one in four Detroiters were touched by just a crime in general. when they looked at property crime
when they isolated that, it seemed that it was a little bit less than one and four. But still one and four is a lot or
Guy Gordon (03:11.703)
Yeah, one of four is a lot and and of course this has contributed to Detroit’s image as being a a city that’s burdened heavily by crime. And that’s why this paper is important to kind of put it into context because this has been an ongoing priority and focus for municipal government going back to the you know the Coleman Young era when it really became a a serious issue. So we’ve of established how we do the the benchmarking and and what yardsticks we used.
Let’s start with larceny. how are we doing? And in just in terms of the the general trend.
Doug Ortiz (03:50.292)
So the general trend is that we that the larceny rate has been increasing since twenty twenty two. And right now we are at a higher level than our pre-pandemic rate. The Detroit’s larceny rate in twenty twenty four was two thousand three hundred and eighty-two larcenies per a hundred thousand people. And
When we benchmarked that to other cities, Detroit had the third highest larceny rate among six pure cities.
Guy Gordon (04:23.701)
Right, only Buffalo and Cleveland use as for those of you that are viewing the podcast, you can see in the bar graph that we have up on your screen. Detroit very close to Cleveland, slightly less than Buffalo, but Toledo, Rochester, Milwaukee, and Newark substantially lower rates of of larcenies. When when no go go go when when you look at that folks may say, geez, w we don’t have a lot in common with Toledo but in terms of size, we’re not comparable. Just
Doug Ortiz (04:26.823)
Yeah.
Doug Ortiz (04:41.447)
Yes. Toledo go ahead.
Guy Gordon (04:53.429)
D defend the comparison a little bit.
Doug Ortiz (04:57.703)
When you look at all of the large cities in the US, we are pretty comparable in terms of population size relative to all the other the rest of the American cities when you stack them on each other in terms of population. So yeah, like all of these all these cities are pretty like they’re in the higher higher percentile of population size among US cities.
Guy Gordon (05:26.943)
And while we’ve seen a lot of the crime rates normalize, in in some cases we saw dramatic drops in some crimes during the pandemic, we’re still higher than our pre pandemic rate, correct? Okay. So it’s a kind of a good news, bad news story. We’ve seen substantial declines from nineteen ninety, but it’s really flatlined over the past ten years or so, and in fact, do we have a forecast on where we expect this to go?
Doug Ortiz (05:40.147)
That’s correct.
Doug Ortiz (05:58.942)
Well, assuming little to no population growth, we were expecting larceny to
to follow a similar similar tr trajectory as other pure cities
Doug Ortiz (06:17.927)
Essentially it would yeah, it would continue to decline if there’s little to no population growth.
Guy Gordon (06:22.495)
Okay. We and we’ll circle back into the whys and hows some of these things are happening with social determinants at the moment, but let’s clear the the deck for one that has really been a big one going back with my forty year history in Detroit, and that is vehicle theft. it’s been a huge problem. It hits Detroiters in the pocketbook heavily because of insurance premiums. That’s often cited as one of the reasons why we have some of the highest rates.
in the nation. How are we doing in terms of vehicle theft?
Doug Ortiz (06:56.051)
So in 2024, Detroit’s motor vehicle theft rate was 1,270 motor vehicle thefts per 100,000 residents. So similar with the larceny rate, it’s increased from the from 2022 to 2024. So it is higher than the pre-pandemic rate. And
Yeah, as you can see from the graph, it is the Detroit has the highest motor vehicle theft rate among pure cities that we benchmarked to. It’s comparable to cities like Rochester, Cleveland, and Milwaukee, who have at least one thousand thefts, motor vehicle thefts per 100,000 people.
Guy Gordon (07:44.758)
Interesting though, I mean, i i when you look back to nineteen ninety, and if you take a a closer look at Doug’s paper at CRCMish dot org, you’ll s you’ll see that I mean it that the the motor vehicle theft rate per one hundred thousand was as high as three thousand, you know, as far back as the the the late nineties. And then the trend line has been quite good that we’ve been making inroads there. Some of that may be because of the anti theft technology on vehicles as they’ve become more sophisticated.
But there has been a significant drop.
Doug Ortiz (08:19.239)
Yeah, historically Detroit has always had a pretty elevated rate of motor vehicle thefts compared to pure cities. we our data goes back all the way to nineteen ninety. So, like as you mentioned, it’s been pretty high historically. and then it’s declined a bit in the pandemic, and then it’s recently spiked up in the past couple of years. So
Guy Gordon (08:46.369)
All right, let’s look at some of the whys. I mean you focus in your paper a lot on the social determinants of crime. and we’ve got a graph here that shows where Detroit rates and it may explain why we have higher challenges than some of the other cities, and much of this is economically based. what what are the key economic indicators that you look at that are considered good social determinants of crime?
Doug Ortiz (09:12.307)
So some of those social indicators include poverty, income inequality, and unemployment. And as you can see from the chart here that is on your screen, Detroit has the lowest medium household income among the six peer cities that we looked at. It has the highest level of residence below the poverty line per 100,000 people.
And also a higher rate of unemployment as well. A modernity of
Guy Gordon (09:44.737)
And I mean not by a little, by a lot, by more than ten percent, the double digit differences between our pure cities.
Doug Ortiz (09:48.091)
Thank you.
Yes. And I think this sorta what what this tells me is that there are economic conditions that make residents desperate and and in those kinds of conditions property crime is more likely to occur.
Guy Gordon (10:08.087)
So as we look at that, and we know that the Sheffield administration has promised to really attack this, every administration has. We know that the Duggan administration, one of the social determinants that they focused heavily on was blight removal. That if you have burned out homes, shells of homes that can be used as a base of operations for criminals or a place for them to hide, that can devalue the safety of of everybody in the s surrounding area. How effective w has that been?
Ben and to the same degree to to to to what extent are are our local leaders handcuffed or limited because so much of what happens in the economy is beyond their control. It’s a state and federal issue.
Doug Ortiz (10:55.485)
That’s true. to a certain extent, local leaders like Mayor Sheffield, they can only they only have purview over the city government and the services they provide. That said, I think they do have a they do con Mayor Sheffield does control the city budget so she can determine, you know, how much is going to policing versus programs that
Can maybe ameliorate some of these economic conditions that make property crime more likely. So I think it’s important to that we that there’s a balanced approach with those two between policing and also dealing with some of the economic and social conditions that create prop property crime.
Guy Gordon (11:47.182)
What does this say o about the some of the previous efforts? The fact that larcenies have remained persistently high, car thefts have fallen dramatically, but are still higher relative to our pure cities. you know, we’ve seen Project Greenlight, we’ve got ShotSpotter, we’ve got a lot of other w you know, we’ve tried to leverage technology. Have those things been effective? Or do these numbers suggest that they haven’t
Doug Ortiz (12:03.602)
Mm-hmm.
Guy Gordon (12:14.081)
been effective enough. I suppose that the counter argument could be it could have been worse, absent those things.
Doug Ortiz (12:20.327)
I think those things make those item those programs that you mentioned, they make Detroiters feel safe. They increase the likelihood that crime is going to be detected, but they’re not necessarily doing anything about the underlying conditions that affect crime and the strongest things that and the the factors that predict crime are economic in nature. They’re related to
Do Detroiters have jobs? Do can they put food on the table?
How can they of do they have a quality life? And I think those factors are I think so it’s hard to so the numbers suggest that I think that property crime has been historically going down and that’s good to see. It has spiked recently, and I think that does coincide with some of the economic conditions that we’ve seen recently.
Guy Gordon (13:18.583)
Uh-huh.
Doug Ortiz (13:26.641)
You know, in our city and the income inequality that has always been persistent in the city.
Guy Gordon (13:32.834)
Yeah, well, it as as so often is, I mean, we’ve we’ve we’ve been trending in the right direction. It’s just that others have trended better, faster. And th they’re also and and I know you look at this closely, Doug, there there was also an effort underway, this started perhaps about four years ago, to give different neighborhoods the tools to approach these problems differently, to kind of experiment on their own. And one of the things that they did, especially when it came to youth gangs and youth crime, was that interacting with youth and having police interact with youth
Doug Ortiz (13:37.575)
Mm-hmm. Exactly.
Guy Gordon (14:03.799)
Give d do more and it it sounds like warm and fuzzy stuff, but it was actually when they looked at it, it was the most effective way to connect. That was quite good. So it’s not just about more policing, it’s about connecting policing to the people in those neighborhoods.
Doug Ortiz (14:18.715)
Yes, research on what you’re describing, community-based policing, seems to be more effective at reducing crime rates in neighborhoods rather than you know, a law and order approach that focuses more on criminalizing and penalizing crime, harshly.
Guy Gordon (14:40.157)
Right. And it well you you you view the the police less as someone that shows up when there’s been a problem and more about someone who’s trying to prevent the problem before it happens. All right. Any other thoughts before we wrap this up? Kind of putting it in a nutshell we’re doing better, but not as well as we could relative to the cities that we have benchmarked against. Is that basically your headline?
Doug Ortiz (14:50.333)
Exactly.
Doug Ortiz (15:03.047)
That is my headline. I think so what we’ve seen from Mayor Sheffield and Mayor Duggan whenever they’ve talked about crime and property crime in the city is that they tend to look at the absolute level of crime. And when you look at that, just just Detroit, just the absolute level of cr crime. It everything looks great. It’s b crime rates are going down, but when we benchmarked other cities, I it I it’s really informative to see how we’re doing.
Relative to some of these other peer cities. And it’s it could be we could be doing better. We still have a very high r rate of motor vehicle thefts relative to our other peers. And that definitely is something that affects the quality of life of Detroiters and whether people want to stay in the city or even come to the city and
Guy Gordon (15:32.887)
Mm-hmm.
Guy Gordon (15:54.219)
Well, it could also be a trickle down effect of people living in the suburbs too. That’s one of those things that impacts insurance premiums and rates throughout the region. Not it’s not supposed to, but it does. We know that it does. And it also d determines whether or not the person next to you on the freeway may even have insurance. We know a lot of people d drive naked, because they can’t afford the premiums that that are out there now. And that’s a a problem that visits itself upon all of us if we get into a a a traffic mishap.
them. So all good stuff. Doug Ortiz, thanks for your analysis on this. And you can find Doug’s other papers and especially the one on violent crime, which was an eye opener. That can all be found at crcmish.org. And as always we ask you if you enjoy our fact-based approach to analysis and our objectivity, to both go to our website crcmish.org and maybe throw a few coins in the pot to help fund our efforts here to keep our fact tank
Doug Ortiz (16:25.286)
Exactly.
Guy Gordon (16:53.559)
fueled. Try saying that three times fast. Until next time, I’m Guy Gordon. Take care.
