Teressa Benz didn’t know the woman well. She was African-American, about 65 years old, didn’t know how to read and had a son serving a life sentence for shooting a police officer.
The two sat on the woman’s front porch in an underprivileged Detroit neighborhood one evening in the summer of 2014. Benz probed the woman’s memories to acquire an opinion: what did she think about guns?
“She wanted to create a machine to vaporize the guns so they’d be all gone,” Benz said. “Meanwhile, she was pro-gun because she realized that was a dream, a fantasy. She realized there was never going to be a machine that could do that, even though she would really like it. She knew guns were necessary.”
Benz, a sociology professor at the University of Idaho, recently completed field research on how Detroit locals protect themselves.
As she would come to realize, and what she hopes to publish in a book someday, is that many Detroit residents take security into their own hands.
Benz, who specializes in criminology, said she initially began to look into Detroit as a case study in 2012, when she heard of a graffiti gang that had frequent encounters with violence. But after a short visit to the city, her project took a different direction.
“I looked into law enforcement, because the graffiti kids weren’t worried about police,” she said. “The people I talked to kind of chuckled abut considering calling the police when they needed help.”
Benz said she looked at the Detroit Police Department and found that it was underfunded and understaffed, which she thought may be related to the city’s high crime rate and gun use. Benz focused her project on the use of firearms in the city and surrounding suburbs.
Benz received $12,000 through UI’s Kurt O. Olsson Early Career Research Fellowship in 2014. She temporarily moved to Detroit in the summer of 2014 to immerse herself in the city. Once there, she described Detroit as “post-apocalyptic,” with decaying skeletons of homes, businesses boarded up and streets overgrown with brush.
“A lot of stuff was started there and now it’s fallen into such ruin, such disrepair,” Benz said. “… It just seemed like this sort of perfect living laboratory for this kind of study. And plus the people that are still there, they’re tough as nails.”
During one month, Benz took a course to receive a Concealed Pistol License, rode alongside Detroit police officers and firefighters and conducted interviews with 31 people. Of those interviews, 26 were usable for Benz’s research project.
Benz asked interviewees about their upbringing, political leanings and if they ever associated with firearms or weapons growing up.
“If they didn’t carry a gun, or even if they did, what else did they do because a gun isn’t always going to protect you,” she said. “People talked about dogs and security systems and most everybody, in some way or another, talked about how their personal safety was their own responsibility.”
After further research, Benz found Detroit residents fended for themselves partially because of the long response time for local police — a creditor’s report in 2013 showed the average response time for the most serious calls was 58 minutes.
While Benz said most of her interviewees were pro-gun — in the sense they either owned guns or recognized the importance of them — there was one outlier in her study.
A white woman in her late 30s who spent all of her life in Detroit was anti-gun, Benz said, even though she had every reason in the world not to be.
According to Benz, the woman was robbed in daylight one afternoon as she was unloading groceries from her car. A man walked up the alley alongside the house and held a gun to the woman’s head until she let him inside.
“He tied her up in the living room while he just emptied her house out and filled up her own car with all of her stuff,” she said.
Benz said the woman managed to get untied while the man carried a load of her belongings to the car, and when he came back she offered to help if he would leave without hurting her.
“And that’s what she did,” Benz said. “You would think that an experience like that would make you want to get a gun. But she was one of the only people I talked to who was completely anti-gun — she didn’t want them on her or in the home and she didn’t think they solved anything.”