Like something out of "The Wire"

Via Will at the League, I see this great, rousing story about a neighborhood in Detroit trying to defend itself from criminals:

Some hire middle-school kids as drug couriers, training them for a life of crime. “These guys have literally taken over these neighborhoods, and they’re the only ones hiring in the neighborhood,” Jackson says. “They’ll hire your kids to run back and forth between the house and the cars. They give them commission.”

Some hoist the smaller kids into the milk chutes still in the walls of the old homes here, where they climb into the house, steal what they can and pass things outside through the narrow opening.

Some steal the infrastructure, the very skeleton of the neighborhood. “It was a Saturday, and Jack called me in the morning, said he’s following two guys with a fire hydrant over here, heading to the junkyard,” says 55-year-old Keith Hines, Jackson’s neighbor and partner in crime fighting. “These two drug addicts had taken that hydrant and put it in their car.” He and Jackson accosted the scrappers at the junkyard, had the yard owner block their car from leaving, even interrogated them on video until police arrived. Next to their car was a pile of street signs someone else had sawed off and brought in.

But hey, I’m sure the residents of that neighborhood would be safer if handguns were outlawed, ammiright?