I agree with you ISO. I had numerous friends and neighbors mugged in Detroit. We also had two kids in school who ran out of gas downtown and got killed for the contents of their wallets. My dad had two cars stolen from his office parking lot. Detroit is a rough town. The state of Michigan however is a beautiful place with great people.
I'm sure it's even worse now with what the auto industry is going through....
My Gary situation was no fun. I was a sales rep for a medical supply company. I was getting sick of hospital food for lunch so I went to a McDonalds in Gary. I'm wearing a suit....I walk into the bathroom and 6 young men came in and also said wallet and gimmee in the same sentence. I also did not have a gun and probably wouldn't have pulled it as all 6 kids had knives. I wasn't going to argue. The whole thing went down in something like 15 seconds.
I ate hospital cafeteria food after that on my weekly visits to Gary.
That incident was one of the reasons I moved to Seattle.