Crain's Detroit Business : Subscription Center. The Bills That Want to Solve Detroit's School Crisis. Three months into her son’s first pass at third grade, Arlyssa Heard had a breakdown. Judah was bright, but had begun calling himself stupid. The chaos of Detroit’s precarious education landscape had forced him to switch schools every few months, leaving him further and further behind. There was no central system to transfer Judah’s records when he moved, and according to Heard the school where he started the 2014-15 academic year had a single teacher assigned to 44 third-graders.
Heard was virtually alone in trying to deal with the fact that her boy, then 8, could write only the first two letters of his name. Heard says she was one of the parents Detroit Public Schools turned to when it needed a strong family showing at a rally or community members to serve on a task force. She was running for the Detroit School Board. But when she needed help, she had nowhere to turn. “Here I was this advocate for education, and I couldn’t find a place for my son,” she says. We saved the automakers. How come that didn’t save Detroit? It's common for headline-writers to refer to the Big Three automakers — Ford, Chrysler, and GM — as "Detroit.
" The monument to Joe Louis in Detroit, known as "The Fist. " (Paul Sancya/AP) But that metonymy is misleading in a very important way. The fortunes of Detroit the city are no longer tied up with the fortunes of the Big Three automakers. That helps explain why Ford, Chrysler, and GM have all been thriving since the auto bailout in 2009 while the city of Detroit continued to deteriorate and has now just declared bankruptcy.
From 1910 to 1950, Detroit's economy was synonymous with car manufacturing. Even then, much of the auto industry's industrial base wasn't in the city proper. But starting in 1950, automakers began moving more and more of their operations further away. Detroit's auto jobs kept vanishing as the Big Three lost market share to foreign automakers starting in the 1970s. Today, there are only two auto factories left in Detroit. But that's it. Wonkbook newsletter. Anatomy of Detroit’s Decline - Interactive Feature. Mayor Coleman A. Young of Detroit at an event in 1980. Richard Sheinwald/Associated Press The financial crisis facing Detroit was decades in the making, caused in part by a trail of missteps, suspected corruption and inaction.
Here is a sampling of some city leaders who trimmed too little, too late and, rather than tackling problems head on, hoped that deep-rooted structural problems would turn out to be cyclical downturns. Charles E. Bowles, backed by the Ku Klux Klan, was in office for seven months in 1930 before people demanded his removal. Edward Jeffries, who served as mayor from 1940 to 1948, developed the Detroit Plan, which involved razing 100 blighted acres and preparing the land for redevelopment. Albert Cobo was considered a candidate of the wealthy and of the white during his tenure from 1950 to 1957. Coleman A. Kwame M. Dave Bing, a former professional basketball star, took office in 2009 pledging to solve Detroit’s fiscal problems, which by then were already overwhelming. Bottom line after Detroit bankruptcy: 200 more police officers, 100 new firefighters. Chief U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen, lead Detroit bankruptcy mediator on adjustment plan Chief U.S.
District Judge Gerald Rosen, the lead bankruptcy mediator, thanks a large group of people who worked on Detroit's bankruptcy deal and sacrificed for the greater good during a press conference after U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhode's confirmation of Detroit's plan of adjustment at Theodore Levin United States Courthouse in Detroit, Nov. 7, 2014 (Tanya Moutzalias | MLive Detroit) DETROIT, MI -- The city can now afford to hire more police and firefighters. That's the bottom line after a 16-month court process that came to a triumphant climax Friday with Detroit being authorized to shed $7 billion of debt. "There are going to be more than 200 additional police officers on the street as a result of the plan," said Mayor Mike Duggan. Implementation of an elaborate, 10-year plan to restore long-broken city services is now possible after U.S.
Others complied for fear of deeper cuts. Cuts in fire protection leading to deaths in Detroit. By Lawrence Porter 12 February 2013 Detroit firefighters battle a house fire A series of brutal budget cuts to the Detroit Fire Department and other social services by Mayor David Bing, the Detroit City Council and Michigan Governor Rick Snyder is producing the foreseeable outcome: the death of Detroit residents. One tragedy follows another. Most recently, six-year-old Miguel Chavez died, in part due to a delay in the arrival of emergency services, when his family’s Southwest Detroit home caught fire. A week earlier, firefighters from southwest Detroit were called to fight a fire in the northwest, a distance of 18 miles, because of fire station closures.
Not long before that, a 71-year-old man died in a house fire only four minutes away from a fire station recently closed. “They are killing people,” said one firefighter, after he and a coworker pulled an elderly couple out of their home in a fire in November. Aftermath of a residential fire in Detroit A new fight-back is required. Detroit loses 1,400 police officers in a decade, struggles to keep pace with crime. RELATED: Find details on police and crime trends in your area.
DETROIT, MI - Police officers in Detroit, a city that's struggled for years to maintain services, are working as hard as ever. There just aren't enough of them. The state's largest department thinned from 3,700 sworn officers to 2003 to just over 2,700 in 2012. Today's count is 2,419. That's a 35 percent decline — more than one third — in a decade. By contrast the state's second largest department, the Michigan State Police, lost 17 percent of officers in the past decade, according to an MLive Media Group investigation into a decade of police manpower and crime statistics.
"We only have just under 1,900 actual police officers, who are the ones who will respond to your house and your crisis situation," said Mark Diaz, the police union president. Detroit currently has 16 sworn officers per square mile; Los Angeles had 25, based on 2011 FBI data. Related: Detroit hosts first recruiting fair in decade Other moves include: New paramedics to help Detroit improve 911 response time. Inkster Police Chief Resigns Citing Senseless Crime, Lack Of Resources.
DETROIT (WWJ) – Inkster’s police chief has resigned. Hilton Napoleon turned in his resignation Thursday, citing what he calls the “senseless murder of a two-year old” as one reason. Napoleon also says he’s been working under extreme working conditions during the past 18 months, including the lack of resources. His resignation is effective Friday. The two-year-old he is referring to is Kamiya Gross. She was shot to death July 1 outside a home on Carlyle Street. Her funeral is on Saturday.
Napoleon, has been on the job for about three years, and has advocated for Wayne County Sheriff’s department to step in and handle Inkster’s policing–to save money and to help crack down on violent crime. The city is under a consent decree with the state – as it has seen its police force dwindle from about 60 to 25. “They shouldn’t be wearing the badge, some of them, and they want to tell me how to run the police department, but that’s not going to happen,” Napoleon said at the time.