Detroit's council president gets a full-time officer from the time he or she leaves the house in the morning until returning at night. Eleven cities surveyed by the Free Press with populations and government bodies similar in size to Detroit's limit security for their members mostly to a presence during council meetings. None have a designated unit like the Detroit council's, which includes nine sworn, armed officers.

Detroit Councilwoman Barbara-Rose Collins said Detroit is a dangerous city, and council members need the unit, especially when they travel to community meetings at night.

The city put out a news release containing criticism of the study from the president of the American Society of Criminology, and explaining that most shootings in Detroit are drug-related and not random. It also points out that some major cities, like Chicago and Minneapolis, were left out of the rankings because they do not report their crime data to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where CQ Press gets the figures it uses.

`We have battled negative perceptions for more than 40 years and the spirit of Detroiters will not be broken by a designation from a group that misused statistics to draw unfounded conclusions about the safety of our city for the purpose of profit.' --Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick

In any case, really dilapidated cities that have crime rates like Detroit surely protect their council members all day too, don't they? Like Washington D.C. maybe? Well, no. No they don't (and stop calling me 'Shirley!'). According to the freep:

Not even Washington, D.C., sensitive to terrorism-related concerns, nor San Francisco -- where a mayor and member of the city board were assassinated at City Hall in the 1970s -- provide protection to their legislative bodies at the level Detroit does.