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I'm also in the Midwest, Michigan in fact, and until Chicago (another city I've loved and lived) went especially wild, three or four of the top murders per capital cities were in Michigan. My hometown was number one for a few years. The Midwest isn't quite the sleepy idealic place many used to believe it was. A major reason for this has been the loss of so many factor jobs within the auto industry and otherwise. The worst unemployment rates were in the Midwest (with MI topping the list at the time things were at their worst with murder and crime). Often the big cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Indy had even higher unemployment rates than the general state-wide ones. I can't speak personally for Indiana but I assume as in so many larger cities racial divides are strong and poverty and blight are rampant. Cities struggle to afford adequate police, fire, and ambulances or as was so often told about Detroit, the city couldn't afford streetlights! Chicago and Detroit both had some notorious mismanagement and corrupt city leaders... so there's so many factors. A lot of those same factors no doubt relate to the massive drug issues that seem to be hitting the Midwest and especially Indiana so hard.
I'm not sure if I'd lump Delphi in with Indy since it's far enough away (get an hour outside of Detroit in any direction and it's a whole other world, similar again with so many of these larger struggling midwestern cities) and that is the thing. As bad as those few Michigan cities were with murder just living in the suburbs of any of them was so different and so much safer. But people do overtime seem to spread out from the cities- for safety, for racial reasons, for jobs, to escape poverty, etc. so I guess still pertinent. I'm sure you also saw in your reading there seemed to be a year where Delphi got a large number of new residents and around that very same time crime spiked considerably. I feel like this was 2011, 2012? I don't have the data in front of me but I found it very interesting and telling really. While crime tends to be much lower outside of the Indys, Detroits, Chicagos of the Midwest there's a lot of changing dynamics really everywhere due to the aftermath of the economic collapse and all those other things I mentioned above. It's a changing world and in many ways I think even moreso here in the Midwest than in many areas of the country.
Anyway I'm rambling but this kind of stuff is a general area of interest for me. I so love so many of these problematic Midwest cities and it breaks my heart to see them struggling so (though I can speak personally for MI and say I've seen a great deal of improvement and every time I'm in Detroit I'm blown away by how much is going on and changing for the better since I lived there a decade ago). Does beg the question though if improving the bigger cities just sends the crime elsewhere.
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