This shrinking city needs to hang on to people like Johnette Barham: taxpaying, middle-class professionals who invest in local real estate, work and play downtown, and make their home here.
Ms. Barham just left. And she’s not coming back.
In seven years as a homeowner in Detroit, she endured more than 10 burglaries and break-ins at her house and a nearby rental property she owned. Still, she defied friends’ pleas to leave as she fortified her home with locks, bars, alarms and a dog.
Then, a week before Christmas, someone torched the house and destroyed almost everything she owned.
In March, police arrested a suspect in connection with the case, someone who turned out to be remarkably easy to find. For Ms. Barham, the arrest came one crime too late. “I was constantly being targeted in a way I couldn’t predict, in a way that couldn’t be controlled by the police,” she says. “I couldn’t take it anymore.”
A truly depressing story. That said a few quick observations come to mind
1. Dogs can be a useful low tech security tool and are often a very good deterrent. IMO electronic security systems are overrated But…
2. A .12 Gauge shotgun is a good back up for those situations where the dog fails to deter. Also dogs aren’t always with you. I don’t know what the laws are like in Detroit but had I the misfortune of living there, some form of firearm would have been on my person every time I set foot outside the house or even opened the front door. File this under “better to be tried by twelve than carried by six.”
In the end though I think she was bullheaded and mistaken in her determination to stay. Back when I was in the Navy a buddy who knew I had some personal weapons and knew how to use them told me he wanted to get a gun. He asked what kind he should get. I responded by pointing out that depended on what it was intended for among other factors. He responded with personal protection as his primary desire and noted he lived in a really bad neighborhood.
I told him to forget the gun and move. Unless you can’t afford to (and that was not the case here or with Ms. Barham); if you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe without a gun, then you need to move.
People who refuse to do that in most cases have some questionable priorities in their life. Personally, I have never owned anything material that was worth shooting someone. And if staying where you are could mean getting seriously hurt or killed, or having to shoot someone, then it is time to move on.
Ms. Barham I believe is very fortunate to be alive.