Detroit: Where Private Security Is Booming

With a police force decimated by budget woes, the Motor City's middle-class enclaves are hiring their own to fight rising crime. Where security is a booming business

James Griffioen

A Dusing Security truck patrols the twilit streets of Indian Village

Shortly before noon on a recent Monday, T.J. Cooper sat in his red pickup, showing off his digital camera. He clicked through pictures he had taken a few weeks earlier of a man driving a truck full of radiators stolen from a vacant home here in Indian Village, one of Detroit's last middle-class neighborhoods. No one, Cooper notes wryly, likes having his picture taken. "They try to hide their face. Or break your camera. Or," he says, driving up a tree-lined street, "break you." Minutes later, Cooper passes the same man, in the same truck, apparently scoping out another house.

Cooper,...

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