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09/09/2004: "Gah"

Nothing like a good dose of depression to suck all coherent thought from your brain.

Tomorrow would have been the 25th birthday of my friend William Lewis. He was brutally murdered at his home in New Orleans in 1998. William didn't know his attacker. He was some crackhead (literally) who spotted a young white kid who would be an easy target to take some frustrations out on then take his stuff to sell for crack money.

In the year I lived in New Orleans, in addition to losing a good friend, I got to see some gunshot victim lying in a pool of blood coming from his head on the street corner, another guy bleeding from the side flagging down a street car after he'd been shot, and two "just finished up" scenes on the street where some sort of bad violence victim was just taken away, before they'd even got the blood and tissue up off the ground.

In my almost 5 years in Detroit, I've seen 0 such scenes. Not, of course, that they don't happen, because they do. Unlike New Orleans, however, a vast majority of Detroit crime does not seem to be random.

People flock to New Orleans for vacation, yet tell someone you're going on vacation to Detroit and they immediately begin talking about getting murdered.

Yet in reality, I'd be a whole lot more worried about getting murdered in New Orleans than here in Detroit. In 2002, New Orleans had 53.07 murders for every 100,000 people. In that same 2002 time period, Detroit had 41.79 murders for every 100,000 people. Other crime crimes listed don't hold much weight with me. Tourists are less likely to report larcenies and minor assaults (especially if they are passed out drunk in a gutter in the French Quarter) and as there is no breakdown (especially in the forcible rape category) of known vs unknown attackers, the statistics could mean anything.

Despite many of the similarities between the mayor of New Orleans (1994-2002) Marc Morial and His Royal Highness Kwame, Morial had something Kwame didn't have - the ability to not act like the huge jackass he was in public. While in office, the news media rarely picked up on corruption within the mayoral department because Morial didn't do overtly stupid crap like hookers, a large posse, and parties. Kwame apparently failed to learn that when everyone he hires wears an "I'm with stupid" shirt and he's got the "Stupid" shirt on, it's not going to look too good.

The NOPD picked up the crackhead in his bloody tshirt, riding on William's bike, with all of his cds a few blocks away half an hour after.

For all the crap given to the NOPD, they did a good job, a lot better than if the same situation happened here, I'm sure.

For the crackheads sake, I hope he's in prison for the rest of his pathetic life. He would not want me to find out he's free.