Wild Night Caught In Detroit With Street Fire, Hit And Run, Naked Hookers [VIDEO]

By Christy Strawser

DETROIT (CBS Detroit) Imagine you're in a fraternity and the wildest night of the year just unfolded. Then multiply that by 10. And set it on fire.

That's the night filmed by amateur filmmaker Charlie Loynes.

Titled "Detroit streets after midnight," Loynes cobbled together footage from about a week's worth of scenes shot in various spots around the city, and posted it on You Tube. It became a viral sensation, racking up nearly 2 million views -- and tons of controversy.

"That has got to be the world's largest zoo," one person wrote on the post, amid dozens of racist observations and angry commentary about Detroit.

Loynes, a retired Detroit cop, says he didn't have a purpose or point of view other than to show outsiders what parts of the city look like after dark.

"I just always, I always manage to have cameras and I just have the hobby of recording in the urban environment, I usually don't do nothing with them. But then I got You Tube," said Loynes, who lives alone on the northwest side and works now works for the Department of Corrections as a security guard at a halfway house.

He spends some time in the video driving down Woodward, in an area that he says is "famous for prostitutes ... transvestites." He catches a couple of them trying to attract customers, flipping up their skirts in plain sight on the roadway and dancing provocatively.

On Tacoma Street, between Gratiot and Schoenherr, he filmed a group of pals arranged around a fire in the middle of the street. He thinks they were using it to ward off mosquitoes.

Then at a liquor store on Joy Road, he stumbled onto what looked like a fight between a man and a couple of women. The man gets hit -- hard -- by a car speeding away from the lot. He drops, then picks himself up, never losing hold of what appears to be a beer in his hand.

"I wondered what happened, because he ran to another car in a lot," Loynes said.

He didn't follow up on that storyline, but he is working on a part two of his video, and says there are more wild night sightings to come.

Is he trying to paint the city in a negative light?

"It's not exactly that, some areas are bad and it brings to light some things people don't know. It's common to people who live here. That thing on Woodward, that happens every day, especially on a weekend night, it's off the hook over there," he explained.

"Detroit does have problems, I've gotten a lot of feedback, mostly from people who are just interested. Some people think I shined a negative light on the city, but I'm showing things some people haven't seen."