Re: Detroit and lack of riots: Last time Detroit had big riot problems was the late 60’s/early 70’s. It was a city of about 1.2 million (if I recal correctly) with a great deal of civil unrest and a large black underclass that felt they had no control and no representation in government or police forces.
Here we are in 2003. Detroit’s population is down to around 600,000 in the city proper - it’s about half the size it was. No recent civil unreast. The politics have been dominated by blacks for over 20 years. The police force is fully integrated and it’s members reflect the community porportions of various ethnic groups, more or less.
Less crowding, more sense of people having a stake in the game despite continued poverty. Less chance of riots. That’s my theory, at least.
The whole 9/11 thing as comparison: Yes, I think past experience counts.
During 9/11 people were under attack - meaning it wasn’t just a random accident but human beings actively trying to kill other human beings. This resulted in a LOT of fear and stress. Also, folks didn’t know what to do - how do you get home from Manhattan if the trains and buses aren’t running? On 9/11 folks had to learn how to cope with that on the fly, many probably never having considered the possibility of the transit systems being completely disabled.
During the blackout - well, at the time folks were probably thinking maybe it was terror and maybe it wasn’t. But, in any case, having evacuated their office buildings less than two years ago under dreadful conditions, they already knew how to get out this time and proceeded to do so. The fact that no buildings were burning or, worse yet, falling down, debris and human bodies raining from the sky, and so forth the stress level was problably much, much less in NYC at least. If the only thing wrong is a lack of power that’s not really that bad - with rare exception it’s not an immediate threat to life and limb, unlike a collapsing building or two.
For the past two years, fire drills and other emergency exercises in other cities in the US have been taken MUCH more seriously. Again, when the power went out folks already knew and had practiced how to get out of office buildings and such. I’m sure this helped other places. Likewise, police and fire response might have been better coordinated. I heard that in a lot of places police were automatically delpyed to various areas to secure them and prevent problems.
Between Y2K (remember Y2K?) and 9/11, we’ve been a little more serious about contingency planning than we used to be. In additions to businesses have better back-ups for data than a decade ago and emergency generators, and folks at home having emergency kits made/stocked, there was much less need for panic buying of things like flashlights. Because people have beeng thinking about “what if?” a little more, they were, on average, a little better prepared to cope with the unexpected.
But, very significantly, 9/11 WAS a change in national attitudes towards widespread emergencies. It used to be that “plane crash” was almost at the very high end of Bad Things That Can Happen. Then we had four of them in less than a single hour. And they weren’t accidents, they were delibrately engineered catastrophes and that morning we didn’t know how many more such there might be. In other words - the worst had happened four time over and there might be more coming. And that was even before the building collapses - two MORE “worst case” catastrophes. And the collapse of part of another building. All before lunch.
Then, in November of that year Flight 587 crashed after takeoff in NYC. I remember the talking heads saying “It appears to be just a plane crash”. JUST a plane crash? That phrase would have been unthinkable in that form only a few months prior. But they were right - it WAS “just a plane crash”. An accident. The Bad Thing happened and all that was left was the aftermath, we weren’t looking at a series of Bad Things occuring over the course of single morning.
Our yardstick for measuring disasters has changed.
Accidents are no longer the worst of all possible evils - an accident happens and is done, and you clean up as best you can. They are, by nature, limited in time and space (although they can be quite large, yes). Now, a delibrate attack - they can be as bad as the worst conceivable accident but they can also keep coming at you so you wind up dealing with one horrific thing after another.
A black out, when you get down to it, is mostly inconvenience. Yes, there will probably be a few deaths to come out of this, just as with a bad storm like a blizzard or hurricaine. Unlike a terrorist attack, though, no one is being targeted for death and for the most part, if you use your head, you won’t be in any real danger. You can’t control the lack of power, but you have a lot of say in how you cope with it. People are less likely to panic or do stupid things (like riot) when they feel they have some control.
