There Is No Winner In Detroit, This Day

At the end of the day, the City of Detroit is still out more than $8 million paid to two former policemen fired by the mayor for looking into improprieties of his conduct. The city can ill afford that chunk of change, deeply in debt, with failing schools and a population shrinking faster than an iceberg during Global Warming.

Those schools, wasted $1.6 million of dollars for art work that it can no longer find, while there is no money for school books or even art supplies.

The economic policies of the city of Detroit and the state of Michigan continue to lose population to other states and economies. Wayne County, where Mayor Kilpatrick will be serving his 120 sentence in jail, is losing population faster than any other county anywhere in the nation.

In the mayor's vigorous defense over the past months, his racist rhetoric has divided a city already known as the most segregated city in the country. In trying to discredit Prosecutor Kym Worthy he stated, “Her hopes is that the racism of this region will convict me instead of the issues of the law and justice."

Kilpatrick picked at the scabs of racial divide. With those four words, "I lied under oath," he puts the lie to all the cynical attempts he has made throughout the past months to place the blame on others.

The mayor will soon be gone, but the open scabs will still remain, and the fault lies entirely with the hubris and arrogance of a man consumed with his own quest for power.

The nightmare ride on which this mayor has taken this city and state has had untold consequences. There is no way to calculate the monetary loss. Conventions that went elsewhere. Businesses that did not locate here. Corporations that chose other locations, visitors and tourists who chose not to come. The mayor chose to put himself ahead of the good of his city, and the city has suffered as a result.

And, although the mayor has finally admitted his wrongdoing, it is important to remember that this entire affair has destroyed three families. Christine Beatty lost her husband and children to divorce, and they have moved out of state. Kilpatrick's children will now have a felon for a father -- and that assumes that his wife is willing to stay married to him under the present circumstances. She has been publicly humiliated by the affair.

And the third family destroyed, often forgotten is Tamara Green. People forget that this entire mess began with her beating and death. Her son will never know his mother.

And, as bad as it all has been, there is more still to come. Police Chief Ella Bully-Cummings has announced her retirement. Sources say it is because she has been involved in the mayor's cover up. That same source says that a second exotic dancer, believed to have danced at the same party as Tamara Green, has been murdered in Florida.

The nightmare that has been of Kwame Kilpatrick's making threatens to continue for the rest of us, even as he is gone.