CULTURE
Detroit SWAT:
Bustin' Doors at the
Miss Quickie Hotel
By Kevin Leeser
The other day I was hanging around the backyard of Brain's house shooting a Red Ryder single pump BB gun at a cardboard target in back of his garage. The odd thing is that I'm 37, not 14, and Brain is a member of The Detroit Police Department's Special Response Team, known throughout TV Land as SWAT.
Brain’s pager went off. This could only mean one thing: search warrant. Brain immediately called his lieutenant to get the location then he called his wife to get permission to go. I asked if I could go along since I’d done some documentary shooting about them before. “Um, sure,” he said.
When we arrive at headquarters, the other team members are looking at video surveillance of the target house and generally doing what they do best -- joking around. Today's search warrant is a joint operation with the Detroit Electric Company and SBC, the regional phone company. It seems that thieves and junkies in the area are ripping off copper cables that connect up their whole infrastructure.
As I understand it, China is sucking up so much of the world’s natural resources that things we used to take for granted, like copper, are selling on the black market for prices akin to gold. It’s all called scrap metal, but the most valuable component happens to be the copper that carries our electrical and telephone communications. Copper is a prime target for scrappers, which is a fancy name for crack heads, which is a funny name for a person who is addicted to cocaine mixed with baking soda.
It’s cheap, effective and has taken a stranglehold on the citizens of Detroit. The rest of the county has methamphetamine problem to deal with, but Detroit looks like it's going to stick with crack. Crack whores used to prefer prostitution as a way to pay for their tweak. Now most have found that stealing copper is a much more cost effective and safe practice, unless of course you get caught.
Pretty much nothing is safe from a scrapper. Live power lines have been ripped off of the poles. The wires inside of homes have been yanked out of the walls. And more than one scrapper has been killed doing the yanking. Major trunk lines of communication cables have been excavated using large construction equipment often painted to look like official repair crews. The price of copper on the street hovers around a dollar a pound. But the cost of repairing the damage is killing the utilities so they are more than willing to cooperate with the Detroit police in finding the perpetrators.
It's a hot summer day: no wind, 85 degrees, around 4 PM. The city is moving at that slow muggy sort of non-speed. Our train of tinted black raid vans does a "slow roll" through one of the more murderous parts of the city. We get some looks from the people who recognize "the package" making a visit to their hood.
Every illicit operation posts lookouts, and everyone sees us coming. The target of the raid today is The Miss Quickie Hotel. No lie. That’s the name on the sign in the back parking lot!
As the vans rumble closer, the chatter on the police radio turns serious. "Make ‘em hot!" the sergeant says as guns are switched off safety. "Hit ‘em HARD!!" he shouts as the van doors open.
I see a very concerned hooker-type about to enter the parking lot. She makes a fast about face and takes the rest of the day off. Smart move. There are a few people lingering around in the backyard. A dude putting a new Holley carburetor in some vintage Lincoln looks up, but doesn’t move. I imagine the shear visual weirdness of 16 heavily-armored ninja cops deploying in utter silence out of these black vans tends to freeze anyone in their tracks.
The SWAT team approaches the back of the hotel, breaking the silence with usual "PO-LICE!!! SEARCH WARRANT!!!" followed by the thudding of their battering ram on a heavy steel door.
I
sit tight in the back of the SUV while the SWAT guys clear the place. Essentially
the SWAT team’s job is secure the location, remove any threats and search
for any hiding bad guys. This place was full of them.
After breaching the rear door, they found several folks lounging about in total squalor -- and a couple of guns. In the abandoned building next door, they found a few more "people of interest" hanging out, even though the roof looked like it had burnt off months ago.
Once the perimeter was secured, the perps were placed in safe positions and I got a chance to look inside The Miss Quickie Hotel. Miss Quickie was built with one long main corridor lined with small rooms. Not quite your four star setup by any means, but the perps did have electricity. In a disheveled lobby area, police found ledgers and logbooks of all their recent transactions with names addresses and everything. Astonished detectives pored over the documents. Someone was going to be getting in a lot of trouble sometime soon.
The beating heart of the copper operation was in the cramped and chaotic basement. There they had rooms packed to the gills with stolen aluminum siding, copper wire and other metal scrap iron. Up in the corners were cameras set up to record the transactions.
Brain and I went home. He went home to his wife and I went home to a little apartment that still had electricity because the scrap whores haven’t denuded our lines – yet.
But this SWAT raid certainly won’t be the end of it. The pillaging of vacant buildings has reached a fever pitch in the Motor City. It’s as if a new industry has sprung up to meet the needs of the people.
I can’t help but mourn a city whose economy has become an irreversible target of global theft. Tear down our power lines and communications network so China, or India, or Japan, or whoever buys it on the scrap market can remold it into cars, appliances and other consumer goods we will buy back from them at cheaper prices.
Detroit used to be the engine of the American economy. Now all I see are no jobs, no education, cheap drugs, and plenty of raw materials to scrap. But thank God, we still have cops. How else could we stop the theft of our natural resources than through raids like the one on the Miss Quickie Hotel? Four junkies and three guns were confiscated in this raid. But I somehow don’t think we’ve gotten to the heart of the problem.
