Yachecia Holston handles the heat on ‘Master Chef’ Page D1
POWERED BY REAL TIMES MEDIA
Volume 80 – Number 46
michiganchronicle.com
July 26 - Aug. 1, 2017
Crime in Detroit neighborhoods:
Expanding the Green Light initiative
By Lester Graham The Detroit Journalism Cooperative
Detroit still has a reputation for being a high-crime city. However, like the rest of the nation, Detroit’s violent crime rate has been steadily declining since the late 1980s. A new crime fighting effort started last year. The Detroit Police Department started promoting its Green Light initiative in January of 2016. It began as a response to late night high profile criminal acts at gas stations. Now it’s also being promoted to business owners who don’t think police are patrolling their neighborhood enough.
This may be how YOU see Detroit, Bedrock, but Detroit doesn’t see Detroit that way Dan Gilbert apology for Bedrock whitewash of Detroit still doesn’t adequately explain how it happened By Keith A. Owens DeAndre Gaines
Senior Editor
“The police response is terrible. The police presence is terrible. Next door has been robbed a number of times,” said Patrick Maher of Eastside Locksmith on East Warren Avenue.
It’s fine that Bedrock founder Dan Gilbert issued his apology so soon after the mural debacle that was burning up social media all weekend, but the one thing his apology did not do was answer the simple question — how the hell did this happen in the first place?
Next door is a Family Dollar store. In January, a clerk was shot in a robbery attempt. The night before that shooting just down the street at Nottingham Pharmacy, there was another attempted crime. Marilyn Nash Yazbeck owns the pharmacy. She says someone used sledgehammer to try to break through the concrete block wall. Thieves have broken through doors and windows to get into her pharmacy at night many times in the past two decades. She believes it’s young people looking for drugs that she does not carry. “Now it’s a coming through the walls issue. You know, so I’ve had my crime. It happens and you get upset, but crime is everywhere,” she said. in.
The police interrupted that break-
Both of those merchants are in the MorningSide neighborhood on Detroit’s east side. Riding in the squad car of Neighborhood Patrol Officer (NPO) DeAndre Gaines, I asked about the merchants’
See GREEN LIGHT INITIATIVE page A-6
WHAT’S INSIDE
If we traced back the steps in the decision-making process that led to the eventual creation and then display of that remarkably tone-deaf piece of art on the side of his building (until it got yanked), how did such an idea keep getting the enthusiastic stamp of approval all the way up the chain? And who conceived of it in the first place? Who in their right mind could look out over an 87 percent black city and see it as predominantly white and young? And yes, I did see Gilbert’s posting of all the panels that would have completed the full image and had the supposed desired effect, but even the full image bore no resemblance to the Detroit I have lived in since 1993. Maybe that’s because I have never lived downtown. Because from what I could see, every panel reflected Detroit life in downtown Detroit. There wasn’t one image of a neighborhood, a park, a building, a statue or a resident outside of that precious 7.2 square miles. For that matter, I didn’t see any old people, nor did I see any children. I didn’t see anyone that even remotely looked like they may have been working class, even though Detroit is renowned for elevating the status of
the working class like no other city in history. Those people are still here. OK, but, “See Detroit like we do,” is what Bedrock wants us to do. Let’s just say we see how you see Detroit. And no apology will erase that. So on the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, we discover that 50 years later perhaps isn’t really 50 years later after all. Recall that in 1968, one year after the rebellion, the Kerner Commission released their seminal report on the reasons behind the explosive event. The most quoted line from that report says that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal.”
That separation of the races wasn’t simply a physical separation, although Detroit was — and is — one of the most racially segregated cities in the country. The most firmly entrenched racial divide was the yawning gap in racial attitudes, perceptions and experiences of reality that existed between whites and blacks. Both races lived in the same America, and yet they didn’t. Today, all these decades later, should be a cause for celebration. This should be the time when we can all collectively look back and breathe a sigh of relief that we have come so far. But instead, all we seem to get is one reminder after another that the issue of race, and our inability to deal with it effectively, re-
DTE Energy ranks high in Indeed’s ‘50 Best Places to Work’ By Alisha Dixon
Serving Our Communities
Better
2017 Fifth Third eBus Tour Special Supplement inside
ny’s culture and commitment to diversity and inclusion as a crucial component that has led to employee satisfaction. In June, Gerry Anderson, CEO of DTE Energy, joined a list of more than 150 CEOs from over 50 industries who made a commitment to advance diversity and inclusion in the workplace by joining CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion™.
Out of 50 nationally recognized Fortune 500 companies, including Facebook, Apple and tech giant Google, Detroit-based DTE Energy was ranked 7th on Indeed’s annual “50 Best Places to Work” report released this month. The results were based on an analysis of over 15 million reviews posted on Indeed.com, the number one job search website in the world. “We are really thrilled. To finish ahead of well-known employers like Nike, Apple, Disney … What is really meaningful for us is that this was an expression of our employees. We’re just really proud that this was the voice of our employees that led us to that recognition,” said Shawn Patterson, DTE Energy vice president of Organizational Effectiveness.
$1.00
See DETROIT page A-6
“While compensation and job security are always top of mind for employees, we are seeing
Shawn Patterson strong company culture and sense of community becoming just as much of a priority … We are seeing people describe these exemplary workplaces as ‘inspiring’ and ‘engaging’ by maintain-
ing excellent company culture, ensuring quality leadership, and offering competitive pay and benefits,” said Paul D’Arcy, Indeed senior vice president. DTE also credits the compa-
“By joining this coalition, DTE Energy’s CEO and 150 of his peers are committing to support open dialogue on sometimes difficult conversations about diversity and inclusion, and implement unconscious bias education to help employees recognize and minimize potential blind spots,” said Diane Antishin, vice president of HR Operations at DTE Energy. “For DTE Energy, diversity isn’t only about race or gender. It’s about recognizing what
See DTE page A-6