1) In the city of Detroit, more than one violent crime per day now takes place at a gas station. Specifically, reports the Detroit News, “Police have investigated nearly 700 violent crimes at Detroit gas stations during the past year, prompting city officials and citizen patrol groups to try to quell the steady beat of murders, carjackings, shootings and armed robberies.”

2) The Detroit city government does an astoundingly poor job of protecting gas stations, their customers, and pretty much everyone else from crime. It suffers from notoriously poor police response times (58 minutes for serious crimes) and closure rates on crime investigations (8.7 percent rate of solving cases). According to Motor City Muckraker, the Detroit Police Department has quietly discontinued putting out its “Major Crime Summary Report” and instead now puts out a summary report of cases that have resulted in arrests, which is better for its image.

3) The city council’s response? It’s to load new legal burdens on the gas stations, specifically by way of “a recent ordinance requiring owners to install security cameras by Aug. 31.” While some stations say they’re already doing that, Auday Arabo, the head of a dealer association, says the requirement “would present a financial hardship for many station owners”: “Is this what government is supposed to do? Mandate you become the surveillance company for the government?”

That’s certainly what Detroit seems to be doing. Strange how when governments fail utterly at their claimed core function of preventing violence, they so often can be found muscling into entirely new areas of coercion at the same time.