In fairness: if you're a white guy a predominantly African American lower-class neighborhood --- particularly Detroit --- and a group of young men smelling of weed are giving you the evil eye, they probably don't want to debate Wittgenstein with you.
My brother has more experience in the business and has been in the area far more than me. He called them drug dealers. I trust his judgement on the matter.
The smell of marijuana was, like I said, an added tell.
It's also pretty hilarious to hear you being scared of kids because they "smell of marijuana".
Of course, they probably did smoke pot. But this would earn them a big "so what?" from me, rather than a panicky exit.
And if they were giving you "the evil eye", that would make me wonder if you did anything to deserve it. Were you sporting bald heads, combat boots, suspenders, and German memorabilia, by any chance?
Or perhaps they'd overheard you talking to your brother about how all the black people had ruined Detroit.
How very droll of you. Maintaining foreclosed properties requires workers to take photographs of the property and secure the building, among other things; especially if the house has been broken into.
By the time we get to a property in a high-crime area, the copper is often long gone. Broken glass isn't uncommon. The amount of destruction done to some of these houses is impressive. There are holes in walls and even holes in the floor. Toilets ripped out, shattered, and left to one side.
I'm left there asking myself: Why go to all of this effort to destroy these things? What destructive impulse must some people have? It's one thing to argue about it in an Internet forum, it's something else to find it in many houses over the course of months.
What does this even mean? I am seriously confused.
"The smell of marijuana was another tell." Wow, the few times I tried weed in college everyone must have thought I was a drug dealer, too.