Detroit crime-fighter trusts watchful eye, shotgun
From The LA Times - 61-year-old James Jackson patrols the streets of a Detroit neighborhood that was once propped up by the city's mighty carmakers but is now a mausoleum...
From Robert Faturechi, The Los Angeles Times:
Reporting from Detroit
As far as neighborhood welcomes go, this one was a bit rough. James Jackson knew as much, but in Detroit’s bleak Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood, there isn’t much time for subtlety these days.
“Just so you know,” he told his newly moved-in neighbor. “There’s probably gonna be some shooting tonight.”
An older woman across the street had testified in court that morning against associates of a suspected drug dealer who was purportedly known to shoot up witnesses’ homes. Anticipating revenge, Jackson had promised the woman he’d stand watch.
“What do you mean shooting?” the new neighbor asked. “Should I call the police?”
“Call the police?” Jackson shot back. “Shoot, I am the police.”
In many ways, that’s true. For three years, the 61-year-old Jackson, a retired Detroit police officer, has patrolled the streets of a neighborhood that was once propped up by the city’s mighty carmakers but is now a mausoleum for vacant homes.
With his video camera, he films the criminals who have filtered in: drug dealers working off the stoops of abandoned homes, burglars casing houses still occupied, chop-shop operators dismantling cars.
Some people grumble about Jackson’s methods, but generally criticism is rare. For many residents, his unsanctioned crime-fighting is a godsend, a source of hope for the neighborhood after the city closed and consolidated the police precinct, along with several others, as Detroit’s revenue and population fell.
Surveillance cameras are mounted on many of the vintage 1930s homes, installed by Jackson and residents he’s joined forces with, and more are on the way via a local business group. Street corners are spotted with bright yellow signs with a blunt warning: “See what you do today on TV at 36th Dist. Court tomorrow.”
On the night he kept watch for the woman who testified, he sat on his porch across the street from her house. A clock radio murmured old-school R&B melodies, just low enough to pique Jackson’s hearing and keep him alert to other sounds, a technique he learned on a special unit of the Detroit police force.
A couple hours after midnight, a Chevy Suburban – probably belonging to the suspected drug dealer – rolled onto Chalmers Street, just beneath the road’s canopy of naked dogwood branches.
It crept past boarded-up brown brick homes before climbing Jackson’s driveway. Its headlights panned across the front porch.
Jackson’s face was still cloaked in darkness, but in his hands the black metal of the 12-gauge shotgun gleaned in the light. Both men were motionless.
“I was more worried about the … paperwork,” Jackson said. “It’s a whole lot of paperwork when you shoot somebody.”
The Suburban backed out, and drove off.
Continue to the full article at The Los Angeles Times.
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