For some reason I find Detroit’s crime demographics fascinating. The city has had more professional makeovers than Sofia Loren, yet the crime rate in the city is about 12 times that of New York on a per-capita basis. What’s more telling is that the distribution has several sharp cut-offs, the most famous being Eight mile road — memorialized in a movie about Emenem — on one side of the Eight mile you have a murder rate higher than Guatemala’s on average, on the other, a relatively decent rate — similar to Brooklyn, NY. I’ve long thought that the high crime was related to the good intentions of the reformers, but I could be wrong. The data is amazing, though.

1 week of crime in Detroit with special focus on 8 mile road — that’s the horizontal cut dividing Detroit, lower from the northern suburbs. The crime area in the upper right is Royal Oak.