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Topic: Crime down- no raises for Police

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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

West Michigan

Crime levels down in Flint

by Logan Crawford

Tuesday, December 27th 2016

flint crime.PNG

FLINT, Mich. (NEWSCHANNEL 3) – Officials in Flint say crime is down in the city.

According to Flint officials, the decrease is related to the water crisis that gripped Flint.

Flint’s mayor, Karen Weaver, was elected on a promise to fix the city’s water problem, and she also hired a police chief to improve high-crime neighborhoods. Now, Flint is ending 2016 with a drop in crime.

For years Flint had one of the highest crime rates in America, homicides in Flint doubled in 2015. However in 2016 homicides are down 22 percent and overall crime is down thirteen percent across Flint.

Four city officials in Flint are facing felony charges over the crisis. Three of the four have entered not guilty pleas while the fourth has not yet appeared in court.

“These people should go to jail,” said Flint resident Melissa Mays, “they should have their rights taken away like we did.”

The city still recommends using a filter before drinking the water in Flint.

As for the city’s crime level, the Flint Police Department’s arrest rate for murder is 95 percent. That’s above the national average of 62 percent.
Post Wed Dec 28, 2016 8:34 pm 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

While the crime fighting tactics of Chief Johnson are working, the Flint police are facing more years without pay raises. They did get back their bereavement benefits that were taken away by the Emergency managers.

The focus continues on the water crisis. However, the City administration needs to realize Flint has issues other than water. Flint needs to support our Flint officer's as so many residents have left Flint because of crime. Our officers need to be rewarded for their continuing to serve Flint when other communities will pay them more.
Post Wed Dec 28, 2016 8:54 pm 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

Flint, Michigan, gets some good news in 2016: Crime is down - CNN...
www.cnn.com/2016/12/26/health/flint-water-crisis-crime-down-...

19 hours ago ... For many years, Flint, Michigan, has been known for its high rate of crime. Homicides are down, and overall crime is down about 13% from ...
Post Thu Dec 29, 2016 5:59 am 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

Some good news for Flint in 2016: Crime is down

By Sara Ganim, CNN

Updated 10:51 AM ET, Wed December 28, 2016



Crime is down in Flint, Michigan, since the city's water crisis became news
Homicides are down, and overall crime is down about 13% from 2015

(CNN)For many years, Flint, Michigan, has been known for its high rate of crime.
The city has spent many recent years at the top of lists that calculate most violent cities in America. In 2015, homicides had doubled, signaling big problems for the small city. But 2016 numbers show a change for the better.

Crime is down since Flint's water crisis hit the news. Homicides are down, and overall crime is down about 13% from 2015.
The police department's arrest rate for murder is 75%, well above the national average of 62.5%, according to department records.
How tap water became toxic in Flint, Michigan
How Flint, Michigan's tap water became toxic
The drop in crime is somewhat related to Flint's water crisis, in which hundreds of children were poisoned with lead and deadly bacterial illnesses spread.
Mayor Karen Weaver was elected on a promise to investigate why, after the city switched to a new water source, people's water smelled bad and caused rashes -- and why the state was still telling people it was safe to use.
Eventually, the state would acknowledge that the problem was far worse than just a bad smell: There were lead and bacteria in the water.
Cleaning house
When Weaver got into office, she cleaned house, replacing several officials, including the police chief. She appointed Timothy Johnson, an area native who worked on the Flint police force for 30 years before retiring in 2009. He had since been running his own private security company.
"I came out of retirement," he said, adding, "this is important."

Johnson started as chief in February and by March had developed an eight-officer team called the C.A.T.T. unit -- for Crime Area Target Team -- which has no set shift or beat.
This team targets high-crime neighborhoods one at a time, saturating them until officers feel that they've reduced the potential for violence and crime.
"These were eight of Flint's finest, and I hand-picked them," Johnson said. "I wish I had eight more. ... We're going to try to push that type of policing through the whole department. We are holding all (officers) more accountable to produce at the highest level they can."
Many in Flint still need bottled water
How to help with the Flint water crisis
In April, about a month after the C.A.T.T. unit hit the streets, Weaver held a news conference to announce the seizure of $18,000 and more than a dozen illegal guns in just two weeks.
For a couple days in September, CNN watched the unit patrol the north end of Flint during the afternoon.

Officers directed their attention to homes they knew were vacant, arresting people who were inside them and finding and seizing drugs. They stopped men known to engage in criminal activity in the past and found weapons. They seized an illegally parked car and the contraband inside.
"When you go out and arrest someone for gun charges and take two to three guns off them, you stopped a bunch of crimes from happening," Johnson said. "Your crime stats start falling."
Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton said Johnson's intimate knowledge of Flint and his own style of policing seem to be working.
"I think Tim is really trying to get a handle on the criminal problems, and he's doing it in his own style, which is street cop style," Leyton said. "He's brought his own street smarts. He himself is a street cop. ... We've seen some success, and I think he's doing everything he's doing for the right reasons."
Leyton says crime statistics don't always paint an accurate picture. Sometimes, population decline skews the percentages, and sometimes, people get discouraged and stop calling police.
This weekend, two people were killed in a triple shooting, and a house was set on fire, Leyton said.
"Having said all that, I think Chief Johnson is doing a good job," Leyton said.
Limited resources
The city's historic financial problems -- it was $13 million in debt -- mean its police force is operating at the bare minimum. Flint has about 100 officers -- a third of the police staffing it should have, given the size of the city, Leyton said.
They learned the truth about their water a year ago. This is Flint now.
A year after the truth: This is Flint now
"It creates a serious strain on our ability to do our job," Johnson said. "We learn to do more with less. I'm restructuring and restructuring and restructuring. But when you talk about how much more effective we could be ... If I just had another 20-30 officers, I couldn't tell you what I could do."
When CNN visited in September, there were periods during the afternoon when only two officers were out on patrol.
Since 2012, Michigan State Police have also helped backfill positions.
But this fall, Johnson announced the start of a volunteer police force that will help with staffing during large events in the city.
For many years, Flint was so known for its crime that when the water crisis began to garner national attention, the statistics on violent crime became a staple cited in all news stories. But while the water crisis continues to affect the everyday lives of people in Flint -- and dominate headlines there -- the crime rate has quietly dropped.
Not all good news
Despite the fall in crime numbers, it hasn't been all good news for Johnson, who's had a fair share of controversy. This summer, a council member made it public that Johnson had allowed his state certification to lapse during retirement and hadn't taken the two-day course required to get it back. (He took that course later in the summer.)
r.
In September, criticisms were lobbed that response time to some 911 calls were as long as 40 hours. Johnson said it was a communication problem that was resolved.
And his shakeup has not met with enthusiasm from the entire department. This fall, he was hit with two lawsuits by Flint officers who claim to have been reassigned for inappropriate reasons: one claiming gender discrimination and another alleging retaliation for corroborating the first officer's story.
"You can't please everybody, and that's really what it is," said the mayor's spokeswoman, Kristin Moore. "I think that has a lot to do with it (criticism of Johnson). What he's doing appears to be working, so isn't that what's important?"
Post Thu Dec 29, 2016 6:06 am 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

The police suffered under the Emergency Managers. The endured pay cuts and loss of benefits. Previously, when other administrations indicated they couldn't increase wages, they promised better pensions. Then the EM's worked to erode away at that.
Post Thu Dec 29, 2016 11:40 am 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

Bridge • The Center for MichiganFewer cops, abandoned parks, and...
bridgemi.com/2016/05/fewer-cops-abandoned-parks-and-why-more...

May 12, 2016 ... As a result, the old industrial city of Flint is in notably worse financial shape than ... dwindling revenues have meant abandoned parks or cuts to youth programs. ... With police typically the biggest department and officer pay the ...
Finding Hope in the Flint Police Department - The New York Times
www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/opinion/finding-hope-in-the-flint...

Nov 21, 2016 ... Our wages and benefits have been cut by more than a quarter since 2011. ... How can citizens in Flint trust the police to protect them when they ... Step inside a police department struggling with budget cuts and public distrust.
Post Thu Dec 29, 2016 11:52 am 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor
Finding Hope in the Flint Police Department

By BRIAN WILLINGHAM NOV. 21, 2016


Flint, Mich. — I joined the Flint, Mich., police force nearly 20 years ago because I believed I could make a difference. Police officers are problem solvers. But sometimes it seems as if the problems have no end. How can a city fall so far that we lose sight of the possibility of solutions?

In recent years here in Flint, we have been asked to do more with less. Our wages and benefits have been cut by more than a quarter since 2011. Because of budget issues, many of us have been laid off and rehired multiple times (for me, it was three times in six years). We used to number roughly 300 police officers; now there are only around 100. Nationwide, there is an average of three police officers for every 1,000 citizens; in Flint, it’s half an officer for every 1,000 citizens.

In one of America’s most dangerous cities, the people who secure the city are less secure than they’ve ever been. Yet we continue serving, as we did through the loss of General Motors, through the crack cocaine epidemic and, most recently, through the mass lead poisoning of Flint citizens.

The crisis around Flint’s poisoned water points to a larger issue of structural racism and poverty in urban society. How can citizens in Flint trust the police to protect them when they can’t even trust their government to provide them with clean water? This is the kind of question that has placed police officers and African-Americans on a collision course. Police officers are seen as outsiders in urban America. White officers are seen as racist, while black officers like me are seen as traitors to our race.

We’re policing a community in survival mode, where adults lack jobs and children lack opportunities, where drugs and guns are plentiful, where the abnormal has become normal. Police officers deal frequently with behaviors that, while suspicious, are not criminal — or at least not criminal in any meaningful way: panhandling, loitering, mentally ill people endangering themselves walking in traffic, people carrying televisions down the street. Sometimes it’s a guy riding a bike, pulling a lawn mower on one side and a dog on a leash on the other. Is the lawn mower stolen, or is this just another oddity produced by the stresses of our environment? At a time when relations between the community and the police are under great scrutiny, tensions in these everyday interactions are inevitable.

Police officers do sometimes make bad decisions when dealing with citizens, but the bigger problem is the social structure that dictates the negative interaction in the first place. While cultural competency for police officers can always be improved, the real solution would be the elimination of the ghettos and poverty. Politically speaking, America desperately needs an urban agenda.

Those police officers who make it are resilient men and women of all races who have been tested in just about every way possible. When those people come together and realize that they’re all in the same boat, what you have is a strong, experienced, formidable police force.

When families are in crisis, it’s the police officer who becomes a counselor. When children go astray, the police officer becomes a surrogate parent. When the economy fails, police officers help feed families. When neighborhoods break down, police officers help facilitate understanding. When citizens can’t reach local politicians, it’s the police officer who must answer their questions.

I’ll never forget the night I received a call to check out a home where neighbors suspected that small children had been left alone. The house sat on a dark corner where the streetlights didn’t work. As I walked up to the front of the house, I saw there was a light on inside and the door was partly opened. When I knocked, a small boy, about 7, answered. He asked me, “Did you come to bring us food?”

When I entered the home I found his four brothers and sisters, between the ages of 5 and 12, in the kitchen, searching for food that wasn’t there. The boy asked me again, “Did you come to bring us food?” I asked the child where his mother was, and he pointed me to the living room, where I found the young mother, crying on the couch. She had been evicted, and the family had to leave the house that night. But she had no car, no phone to call anyone to help her, and no way to feed her children.

Step inside a police department struggling with budget cuts and public distrust.


I made some calls for her on my cellphone until we could arrange a ride. While she waited for the ride, I went to a local restaurant and got meals for the family.

These are things that Flint police officers of all races and genders do for citizens on a regular basis, though often the police administration and City Hall officials have no idea. Protecting and serving in an urban community is about much more than crime fighting.

The police officer in Flint is arguably the most accessible leader available to the people. We are always judged by our response times. No other city leader has this level of accountability. The more hats we wear, the more society expects from us. People expect the police to positively resolve every situation they’re called into, and when they can’t, they’re quickly criticized.

In the end, the burden placed on urban police is that they have the power to either tear a city apart or help hold it together. With all that Flint has been through, I believe it still stands today because of its Police Department.

Brian Willingham is a pastor and an officer with the Flint Police Department.
Post Thu Dec 29, 2016 11:58 am 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

News and analysis from The Center for Michigan



12 May 2016

by Ron French and Mike Wilkinson


In one decade, Michigan cities lost 2,300 police officers.

That’s like laying off every Michigan State Police trooper. Twice.

Ann Arbor lost 23 percent of its police force; Saginaw, 41 percent; Troy, 48 percent.

And it only happened here. No other Midwestern state witnessed anything close to the massive police layoffs that occurred in Michigan between 2005 and 2014.

The distinction isn’t about crime rates but the arcane issue of municipal finance. Simply put, Michigan funds its cities differently than most states. As a result, the old industrial city of Flint is in notably worse financial shape than the old industrial city of Toledo, just across the state line.

The disappearance of one in five city police officers may be the most noticeable impact of Michigan’s growing municipal finance crisis, but it’s far from the only one. In some cities, dwindling revenues have meant abandoned parks or cuts to youth programs. Other communities have deferred maintenance on streets and buildings, or are holding fundraisers to buy basic fire equipment.

And then there’s Flint, where high levels of lead in the drinking water potentially caused life-long neurological damage to thousands of children. The series of bad decisions that led to the drinking water crisis in that cash-starved city emerged from the same milieu of state-level choices cracking the budgets of cities across Michigan.
Database: Big drop in cops 2005-2014

Cities, villages and townships across Michigan were forced to cut police officers as lower taxes — from dwindling property taxes and state revenue sharing — forced many to solve budget woes by going after personnel costs. With police typically the biggest department and officer pay the biggest expense, many were cut. It’s left many Michigan communities with far fewer officers per capita than cities in the Midwest and the country, a byproduct of a municipal finance system that some say is broken. Statistics below are from 2005 and 2014, the latest year for which full data was available. Note: Cities that did not report data to the FBI in both 2005 and 2014 are not included.
Search database:
City 2014 Pop. Gain/Loss since 2005 2014 Officers Gain/Loss since 2005 Percent
change Officers
per 1,000 residents Percent
change
Detroit 684,694 -24.0% 2,318 -1,009 -30.3% 3.39 -8.3%
Grand Rapids 193,385 -1.0% 283 -48 -14.5% 1.46 -13.7%
Warren 135,080 -0.8% 196 -43 -18.0% 1.45 -17.3%
Sterling Heights 131,604 3.2% 144 -26 -15.3% 1.09 -17.9%
Ann Arbor 117,768 3.6% 117 -35 -23.0% 0.99 -25.7%
Lansing 113,901 -2.7% 192 -51 -21.0% 1.69 -18.8%
Flint 99,166 -17.2% 102 -142 -58.2% 1.03 -49.5%
Clinton Township 98,897 3.0% 86 -19 -18.1% 0.87 -20.5%
Dearborn 95,396 -0.2% 182 -3 -1.6% 1.91 -1.5%
Livonia 94,833 -4.2% 117 -33 -22.0% 1.23 -18.6%
Canton Township 89,073 5.1% 78 -2 -2.5% 0.88 -7.3%
Troy 83,279 2.2% 70 -64 -47.8% 0.84 -48.9%
Westland 82,246 -4.8% 77 -23 -23.0% 0.94 -19.1%
Farmington Hills 81,682 1.0% 104 -9 -8.0% 1.27 -8.9%
Shelby Township 76,556 11.9% 62 -8 -11.4% 0.81 -20.9%
Showing 15 out of 326 entries. Type in the ‘search database’ box to find your results.

Source: The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. Local agencies report personnel statistics annually to the federal agency.

Flint, with its tragic decision to save money by switching its water source without properly safeguarding the new water supply, is only the most grievous example. But it is hardly alone among Michigan cities and towns that are facing seismic decisions about how to provide basic services to residents in the face of grim revenue numbers.

Call it the Flint Syndrome, where systemic, long-term disinvestment has imperiled the safety and frayed the quality of life for residents of many Michigan cities.

And the grim choices cities must make are likely going to get worse, unless the state makes fundamental changes to the way cities are funded, say municipal finance experts.

“Cities are bound and gagged financially by the state,” said Mitch Bean, former long-time director of the nonpartisan House Fiscal Agency. “And there’s no way out.”
State’s role in starving cities

Josh Sapotichne, assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University, looked at a map showing the locations of financially distressed cities in the U.S., and noticed something odd. Most distressed cities were clustered in only a handful of states.

Michigan is one of only three states with a double-digit number of cities designated as financially distressed since 2000, according to data he shared with Bridge. Michigan has had 11 designations (Flint and Hamtramck, twice); Ohio, 13, and Pennsylvania, 14. California cities have had their own financial struggles, with several declaring bankruptcy, but the state has no state program to take over the books of cash-strapped municipalities.

“It’s not like Michigan is the only state in the nation with cities that are dealing with the consequences of post-industrialism,” Sapotichne said. “So why is it happening here and why hasn’t it happened elsewhere?”

The surprising answer, according to a report by Sapotchine and a group of MSU researchers: most cash-starved cities weren’t broke because of something they’d done; they were broke because of things their state had done.

Related: City blues: MSU study finds state tax polices cripple cities

“Michigan incubates municipal financial distress,” Sapotichne told Bridge. “There’s a reason why cities in North Carolina or Tennessee are not experiencing the same kinds of financial pressures. Even an all-star team of city officials and managers could not design a strategy to manage their way through the constraints Michigan’s policies place on a Flint, an Ecorse, or a Benton Harbor.”

Those restraints, the report suggests, are an accumulation of decisions by legislators and the public that date back 40 years. Those decisions include:
Headlee Amendment
Thinning blue line

In the last decade, the number of police officers protecting Michigan cities has plummeted as the state fell further behind the nation and neighboring states. For example, if a city like Livonia had the Midwest rate, it’d have 44 more officers than the 117 it had in 2014.
Officer per 1,000 residents (2014) Change, 2005-2014
City size Nation Midwest Michigan Nation Midwest Michigan
over 250,000 people* 2.6 3 3.4 -7.1% -9.1% -8.3%
100,000 to 250,000 1.7 1.7 1.3 -10.5% -10.5% -23.5%
50,000 to 100,000 1.6 1.5 1.2 -5.9% -6.3% -20.0%
25,000 to 50,000 1.7 1.5 1.2 -5.6% -6.3% -14.3%
10,000 to 25,000 1.8 1.7 1.5 -5.3% -5.6% -11.8%
under 10,000 3.7 2.8 1.6 12.1% 7.7% -11.1%

*Note: For Michigan, Detroit is the only city over 250,000 people.
Source: The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. Local agencies report personnel statistics annually to the federal agency.

In 1978, the Headlee Amendment limited increases in property tax revenue collected by cities to the rate of inflation. So during years when property assessments increased more than inflation, millage rates were reduced so total property tax revenue matched the inflation rate. But cities could bump their millage rates back up in years when property tax increases were going to be below the inflation rate. The result: cities lost a lot of revenue in years when property values were skyrocketing, but could make up only some of that loss in other years.
Proposal A

In 1994, voters approved Prop A, which put a cap on property assessment increases of 5 percent or the rate of inflation, whichever was less. In simplest terms, property tax revenues, the bread-and-butter of city budgets, could go down quickly and steeply when property values spiraled, as they did during the Great Recession, but could never go up quickly.

Farmington Hills, for example, lost so much property value during the Great Recession that, given Prop A’s limits on increases, it will take until 2038 just to get back to pre-recession assessment levels – without taking inflation into account, according to calculations by Robert Kleine, former Michigan treasurer.

Prop A also nixed the provision in Headlee that allowed cities to “roll up” their millage rates when the rise in taxable value was less than inflation; that revision made it easy for cities to lose money, but impossible to gain it back. Combined with Headlee, Michigan devised the second-tightest local taxation limits in the nation, ahead of only Colorado.
Revenue sharing

All of which left Michigan cities more reliant on revenue sharing, which is a share of sales tax collected by the state and distributed to cities, villages and townships. The state is required by the state constitution to distribute 15 percent of sales tax revenue to these local governments; a 1998 law passed by the Legislature sets the distribution of another 21.3 percent of the first 4 percent of sales tax revenue to cities. But while setting that distribution level, the law doesn’t require the appropriation. So every year, the legislature decides whether that money actually goes to cities, or is used for other things in the state budget. The Legislature and a series of Republican and Democratic governors have routinely kept some of that 21.3 percent for other uses. By 2015, about $5.5 billion in revenue sharing had been diverted from the cities and towns that were supposed to benefit from that money (another estimated $2 billion has been kept from counties).

With full revenue sharing since 2002, Grand Rapids would have $82 million more in its coffers; Lansing, $63 million; Flint, $62 million.

“Cities are on the bottom of the food chain,” Sapotichne said. “If the state needs to balance a budget, they can not make good on these commitments on revenue sharing made in the ‘90s.”

You can look up how much your community has lost in revenue sharing here.

“For most cities, about 75 percent of revenue comes from property taxes and revenue sharing,” said Anthony Minghine of the Michigan Municipal League, which advocates for Michigan cities. “One is horribly restrained and the other is cut drastically. So cities are never getting ahead of the game.”

Gideon D’Assandro, spokesperson for House Speaker Kevin Cotter, R-Mt. Pleasant, suggested to Bridge in November that Michigan cities have no one to blame but themselves for their financial mess.

Legacy costs – expensive retiree health care and pensions – is hurting cities, D’Assandro said. Sapotichne’s report also cites legacy costs as a contributing factor in city budget problems. “There do appear to be some bad deals out there,” D’Assandro said.
Shedding police
Postcards from a city’s edge: First of two parts

Today: Flint draws the headlines, but cities across Michigan are facing dire, perhaps dangerous choices in part because of state budget policies.

Fewer cops, abandoned parks, and why more cities will crumble unless Michigan changes its ways
Searchable Database: How many cops has YOUR town lost?
WAYNE: Need fire hoses? Pass the hat
BATTLE CREEK: A starving Cereal City
SAGINAW: Parks and wreck

NEXT WEEK Part Two: What Michigan can learn from budget policies in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The impact of fiscal limitations can be seen in police departments in cities across the state.

Michigan’s 22 largest communities and 48 of the top 50 had fewer police officers per capita in 2014 than a decade earlier. (St. Clair Shores and Muskegon had slightly more police per capita.)

Michigan cities fell even farther behind the nation and the Midwest. On average, Michigan cities had 17 percent fewer cops than their Midwestern neighbors in 2005; by 2014, Michigan cities had 24 percent fewer police officers (1.6 police per 1,000 Michigan city residents, compared to 2.1 across the Midwest).

While Michigan has the fewest city police officers, its cities have the highest rate of violent crime and motor vehicle theft in the Midwest. Minnesota added officers in the decade, despite having the lowest violent crime rate in the Midwest.

Flint, with one of the highest rates of violent crime in the nation,was forced to cut its police force from 244 in 2005 to 102 a decade later. By comparison, fellow rust belt city Toledo has more than twice the number of cops per capita, despite a lower violent crime rate than of Flint.

In Hazel Park, the police force has been trimmed from 40 to 33 in recent years. “There’s a minimum number of human bodies you need to perform services,” said City Manager Edward Klobucher. “Nobody wants to relocate to a community that can’t protect itself.”

The impact on public safety is not immediately clear. There’s no crime data to suggest the decline in police officers in Michigan cities has made cities less safe. Crime rates in Michigan have dropped over the past 20 years, as they have nationally.

But police do more than investigate murder, rape, assault, car thefts and burglaries. They are there when there’s a car accident, or when a woman is menaced by her spouse or partner (domestic violence is a crime but not in federal crime statistics). They do crowd control and catch speeders. They line the street when there’s a parade and stroll the stands at Friday night football games.

And in places like Wayne, near Detroit, where the force has shrunk from 42 to 23 officers over the past decade, they routinely work 12-hour shifts to keep residents safe. “Every night I go to bed and I pray that they come home okay,” Wayne Mayor Susan Rowe told Bridge of her city’s overworked patrol officers. “I fear for their safety.”

The impact of fewer officers may show up in other ways.

In Bay City, for example, drunk driving arrests have declined with the number of police officers.

“With less people … less gets done,” Bay City Public Safety Director Michael Cecchini told MLive in 2013.

In Ann Arbor, where the police force shrank 23 percent, the decline has meant the elimination of the drug education DARE program in schools and dedicated foot patrols on the city’s main thoroughfares.

Because the cuts occurred over more than a decade, there has been little public notice that a police force that once stood at 198 is down to 122, with officers working 12-hour shifts, said Ann Arbor Police Chief Jim Baird.

“I think the public has been shielded (from the cuts),” Baird said. “Police are always going to provide the core services. It’s the other stuff that falls by the wayside.”

Other public-safety funding cuts are harder to hide. In Battle Creek, the police station smells of sewage, and office supplies are stored on shelves in the women’s bathroom.

Back in the city of Wayne, community members held a fundraiser at a bowling alley to raise funds for new fire hoses.

“Wayne has a stable population, middle-class housing stock and a large, operating industrial complex, and it’s still almost bankrupt,” said Minghine of the Michigan Municipal League. “That’s the world we live in.”

Because the financial squeeze on local governments happened gradually, deferred maintenance on sewer systems, old playground equipment and outdated public safety vehicles aren’t noticed by the public until there’s a problem. MSU’s Sapotichne compared it to a man eating bacon cheeseburgers every day. Outwardly, his health may seem fine, right up to the day he has a heart attack. “We’re feeling the cumulative effect of 40 years of choices,” Sapotichne said. “This structural financial gap is toxic to cities.

“Cities are going to make mistakes, because they’re being squeezed,” Sapotichne said. “And the consequences of those mistakes are exacerbated because of this financial structure.”

Those mistakes could mean bankruptcy.

In Flint’s case, it meant poisoned water.

“If all these cities are struggling, it tells you there’s something wrong with the model,” Minghine said. “We lose sight of how everyone is dancing on the edge of the cliff.”
Post Thu Dec 29, 2016 12:05 pm 
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