Detroit thread. Post Kwame, Monica, and $1 houses here.

[Savonarola]

From the FREEP:

What killed Detroit?
August 6, 2009

I came across the piece below this week at NewMajority.com, a political blog edited by David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and the guy who coined the phrase, "axis of evil" after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Normally, Frum writes about politics, but this piece is about history and social progress right here in Detroit.

Some of his observations (those of an outsider) are eerily, and painfully accurate. And much of his advice is counterintuitively sharp.

Other parts I thought were pretty obtuse, even callous.

Either way, though, I figured it might inspire a good discussion here.

By David Frum
Detroit was the Silicon Valley of the 1920s — the booming home of a glamorous new industry, a place where huge fortunes were conjured in years, sometimes months. But while the creators of the computer industry have as yet bequeathed very little to the built environment, the automobile industry piled up around it an astounding American city, in astoundingly little time.

The Detroit of 1910 was a thriving Midwestern milling and shipping entrepot, a bigger Minneapolis. The Detroit of 1930 had rebuilt itself as a grand metropolis of skyscrapers, mansions, movie palaces and frame cottages spreading northward beyond the line of sight, exceeding Philadelphia and St. Louis, rivaling Chicago and New York.

I had a chance to tour central Detroit recently, my first visit to the downtown core in many, many years.

Some of the old visual magnificence remains, has even been improved.

But for the most part, all is decay. Whole towers stand empty, waiting to join the long line of grand structures that have either been abandoned to pillage and ruin, like Detroit's once magnificent neoclassical skyscraper of a train station, or else pulled down entirely, like the downtown Dayton Hudson department store, once the largest enclosed shopping space in the United States.

Detroit's fall was as steep and rapid as its rise.

In 1960 it remained a thriving city, showing early signs of future trouble yes, but still strong, rich, and proud. By 1970, Detroit was a byword for urban dystopia.

Detroit Then and Now, by Cheri Gay, compiles a series of photographs to illustrate the change. The book in one way is a disappointment: it's written in a tone of forced boosterism that requires the author to deny the reality of the collapse she's chronicling. Detroit was vibrant then, and it remains vibrant now, she wishes to argue... like Sarah Palin's career, it's just advancing in a different direction.

This mode of argument will convince nobody. But sustaining it does require the author to avert her glance from those sections of the city where the theme of evolution cannot possibly be sustained: the acres of abandoned houses, the vacant lots where commercial enterprises once stood.

But here is one thing that I do learn from the book: Detroit has never been protective of its past. In the prosperous early 1960s, it used federal urban renewal funds to pull down its grand Romanesque 19th century city hall. (Detroit wants to use today's TARP money to repeat its vandalism, this time on the old train station.)

Detroit sacrificed a handsome row of pre-Civil War mansions built by then-leading citizens to allow the Detroit News to erect a bland new office and printing block. It has erased almost all traces of its pre-automobile past from the downtown, and only lack of demolition funds preserved its oldest surviving downtown neighborhood, now faintly recovering as a yuppie-gay historical enclave.

Not all the urban renewal schemes failed. I was dazzled by a Mies van der Rohe townhome project, a human-scale garden streetscape in the middle of the city, so lovely that you could almost forgive the grim adjoining Mies van der Rohe high-rise apartment projects.

More often, however, urban renewal was to Detroit what the RAF was to Dresden. One heart-rending contrast: the General Motors plant in Hamtramck, where acres of solid working-class housing were bulldozed — not to make way for the factory itself, which required relatively little space, but so that the factory could be surrounded by parking lots, grass and a wide moat of highway from the rest of the city. It makes a heart-rending contrast to the abandoned 1920s Packard factory I visited, where cottages had been built literally across the lane from the factory wall: literally 40 feet away.

What killed Detroit?

The collapse of the automobile industry seems the obvious answer. But is it a sufficient answer? The departure of meatpacking did not kill Chicago. Pittsburgh has staggered forward from the demise of steelmaking. New York has lost one industry after another: shipping, garment-manufacture, printing, and how many more?

Two other factors have to be considered.

The first is the especially and maybe uniquely poisonous quality of Detroit's race relations. Like Chicago, Detroit attracted hundreds of thousands of black migrants between 1915 and 1960, mostly very unskilled, hoping to gain well-paying employment in factories and warehouses.
Their arrival jeopardized the ambitions of the white working class to raise its wages through unionization. Henry Ford eagerly hired black workers in order to defeat the unions, and in the violent labor clashes of the 1930s, whites and blacks often confronted each other as strikers and strikebreakers.

After the war, the United Autoworkers union tried to integrate blacks into the industrial workforce. But by then automation had begun, and industry's demand for unskilled labor would first cease to grow, then diminish, then disappear. For many migrants, the promised land soon proved a mirage. Or maybe worse than a mirage. If the promised land did not yield the hoped-for industrial jobs, it offered something else: generous new welfare programs, the ashy false fruit of urban liberalism. The children of the parents who accepted the fruit grew into the criminals who drove first the middle class and then the working class out of the downtown and then altogether out of the city.

As the white working class departed, Detroit became a black-majority city, governed by a deeply aggrieved and flagrantly corrupt political class. Political dysfunction spiraled the city into another cycle of dissolution and abandonment — and the abandonment in turn provided the politicians with fresh grievances.

The second factor in Detroit's decline is the city's defiant rejection of education and the arts. Pittsburgh has Carnegie-Mellon. Cleveland has Case Western Reserve University. Chicago has the University of Chicago, Northwestern, and a campus of the University of Illinois. Detroit has... Wayne State.

A city that celebrated industrial culture spurned high culture. The Detroit Institute of Arts is very nice. But it does not begin to compare to Cleveland's museum, let alone the Art Institute of Chicago.

Detroit has a symphony orchestra, but its history has been troubled and unstoried in comparison to Philadelphia's or Cleveland's. On the plaza in front of the Detroit municipal building is a huge bronze replica of Joe Louis' fist and arm, as if to say: "Here is a city ruled by brawn." Brawn counts for very little in the modern world. The earnest redevelopers who hoped to renew Detroit by razing its history instead destroyed the raw materials out of which urban renaissance has come to so so many other American downtowns.

A couple of days after I returned from Detroit, I telephoned a friend who had lived and worked in the city for many years. My friend, it's relevant to mention, is the son of an Irish cop, ardently Catholic and defiantly conservative. Why did Chicago recover and Detroit fail, I asked. What doomed the city? He thought for a moment. "Not enough gays."

Detroit confirms the lessons taught by Jane Jacobs and Russell Kirk. Preservation is as vital to urban health as renovation. Indeed, they are inseparable. The preservation of the old incubates the new.

It's a lesson with application not only to Detroit's past, but its future. The great factory complexes along the Detroit River have shuttered. America no longer manufactures here. Some will want to rip the factories down. Leave them be — leave them for now as monuments and memorials of the achievements of the past; leave them for the future, when somebody will want them.

Want them for what? Who can say? Who in 1950 could ever have imagined London's Docklands converted into condominiums? Who would have guessed that New York's emptied toolshops would provide some of the city's most coveted office space? The 22nd century will put the artifacts of the 20th to equally unsurmisable uses, if only we permit it. Cities can molder for a century or more, and then reawaken to a new era that rediscovers something of value in the detritus of an earlier time. Brooklyn did. So did Miami Beach. Ditto Boston and Charleston — and even more spectacularly, Dublin and Prague.

The promise of renaissance may yet come true, even for the ghost city of Detroit.

Some of this is dead on other parts, not so much.  It's hard to imagine anyone describing the city of Mary Chase Stratton, Albert Kahn and Joyce Carolyn Oates as devoid of high culture.  There was no good reason to build a major university in Detroit when The University of Michigan is all of 40 miles away.  The Detroit News Building is one of Albert Kahn's many industrial masterpieces; it's definitely not bland.  The acres of working class houses bulldozed to make the Poletown Plant would be acres of abandoned houses today if they hadn't been bulldozed.  Leaving abandoned factories standing  is a strategy we've been using for the past 55 years.

[KRonn]

Interesting article. Pretty depressing to see a city in decline like Detroit is, serious decline. At some point it will re-emerge, as the article makes the case for, but for now it's pretty tough going.

[Savonarola]

More Travels with Charlie

Another gaffe for DPS: Kids' secrets left to rot
Charlie LeDuff / The Detroit News
Detroit -- The secrets of 20,000 schoolchildren lie naked and abused in a deserted warehouse near the Michigan Central Rail Depot.

For example: Jeanette, 11, had an IQ of 57, was mentally unstable and lived in poverty.

The emotional troubles of Bobbie, 7, stemmed from being caught in an emotional tug of war between two bickering and divorced parents.

Johnnie, 8, liked to fight because, his psychologist surmised, his parents placed unrealistic pressure on him to perform.

These intimacies and more are revealed in a thousand spools of microfilm containing the psychological cases of former Detroit schoolchildren. They are not under lock and key, as one might assume, but lying around in the old Roosevelt Book Repository off Michigan Avenue.

The building was owned until the early '90s by the Detroit Public Schools and served as a storage facility for books, crayons and case records from the district's psychological clinic.

Chances are, if you attended Detroit public schools between the 1950s and the 1980s, and you saw a psychologist, then your childhood yearnings and anxieties are visible to anybody with a pair of boots and a crowbar who wishes to view them. Also in the dank, ruinous warehouse are crates of birth records and employment permits that in some cases contain Social Security numbers.

The repository has been raped and looted by scrappers and vandals since it caught fire more than two decades ago. Judging by the condition of some of the unspooled film, the looters also rummaged through the most personal details of some children's lives.

Little Johnnie is now 66-year-old John Brust. He is a businessman living in Rochester Hills and seemed amused that his past had come calling a half-century later.

"Let's face it, we're seeing firsthand what a failure the schools have been to the children of Detroit," Brust said. "The incompetence. How the money is being stolen from their own kids. I want the records destroyed. The world doesn't need to see my childhood problems. When I was a kid, I hated school, OK?"

The discovery of the records unmasks another colossal failure in a string of colossal failures within the Detroit Public School system, said Jack Kresnak, president of Michigan's Children, a nonpartisan advocacy group.

"It is unbelievable and outrageous and, sad to say, par for the course of how things have worked at DPS," Kresnak said. "The confidential nature of psychological evaluations for children is something that should be sacrosanct. Apparently, Detroit children don't deserve this basic dignity."

Detroit schools have a well-earned reputation as some of the worst in the nation. They are so bad, in fact, that closing them down might be considered something of an educational advancement. Recent audits have shown that millions of dollars have been siphoned off by employees, hundreds of no-show jobs and dead people still drawing health benefits. The graduation rate is 25 percent by some estimates. A school board member recently had his children taken away by the court.

Last week, it was announced that several thousand identification files of employees with Social Security numbers were found lying around unguarded in an undisclosed location. On Wednesday, the Wayne County prosecutor issued arrest warrants for five school employees for embezzlement, among other things. And the man brought in to clean it all up, Robert Bobb, the emergency financial manager, was found this week to have given a million dollar no-bid contract to his former employer.

But the emergence of the unguarded psychological records may carry the most chilling consequences of all, said Dr. Gerald Shiener, a prominent psychiatrist at the Wayne State University Medical School.

"Patients have to be confident that their most inner thoughts and feelings will be safeguarded," he said. "It inhibits the patient's ability to speak honestly if they can't be sure that those thoughts remain confidential."

Jennifer Mrozowski, a spokeswoman for DPS, said in a written statement: "While we have not owned that building for years, we know that buildings owned by the Detroit Public Schools were not always properly secured when they were closed or sold, resulting in records, equipment, desks and other valuables left to vandals and thieves, in some cases."

Nevertheless, Mrozowski stopped short of claiming ownership of the files.

But in the opinion of Mayer Morganroth, a noted Detroit lawyer, the school district is responsible for the files and has exposed itself if not to criminal charges then certainly a multi-million dollar civil lawsuit. "Those records are the responsibility of the school district and the examining psychologists. They are privileged documents and should never have been arbitrarily exposed."

The building, owned by trucking magnate Matty Moroun, has been sealed off since January, when a man known as Johnnie Dollar was found there, frozen in an elevator shaft, only his feet and ankles protruding from the ice.

Told of the 10,000 other ghosts inhabiting the place, Dan Stamper, an adviser to Moroun, promised extra security at the building, until school officials remove the records, and trucks to help haul the records away.

As for little Johnnie Brust, he has done well. He now makes a good living in automobile parts. He has four grown children. "I'm happy in life," he says. "I'm just anxiously waiting on grandchildren."

Where do they find these school board members?  And I can't understand why Obama is having such trouble providing health care for everyone when here in Detroit it's so abundant that we can afford to supply it to dead people.

[Savonarola]

5 more face charges in probes of DPS
Doug Guthrie / The Detroit News
Detroit -- Embezzlement charges expected today against five former Detroit Public Schools employees are only the latest from an investigation attacking the district's "culture of corruption."

"Unfortunately, this is not the last time we will stand before you. It is the first of a wave of charges," Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy said Wednesday.

Worthy said she was not surprised to find corruption inside the school district's administration. What surprised her was "how overt, conspicuous and downright barefaced a lot of it is."

Eight more employees and people associated with school workers also could face charges soon, Worthy said.

The five who face criminal warrants are expected to turn themselves over at 1 p.m. for arraignment at the city's 36th District Court. They have been terminated by the district.

The district's state-appointed emergency financial manager, Robert Bobb, insisted Wednesday was a good day for the district, not a sad one.

"My clear message to parents," Bobb said, "is you should never feel more confident than this moment ... that every red penny intended for your children's education is being spent for your children's education."

The district's inspector general, John E. Bell Jr., a former FBI agent appointed in March by Bobb, said he has launched 129 investigations into incidents going back seven years.

Bell said 52 investigations are closed, with most heading toward state felony charges through Worthy's office or federal charges through U.S. Attorney Terrence Berg. Twenty-five employees have been cleared of accusations, Bell said.

"Many of the cases were simply horribly bad deals (contracts and leases signed by the district), where no money can be recovered. But, we continue to look for the quid pro quo (evidence of wrongdoing in the contract process). There must be consequences for fraud and abuse, the robbery of our children of a quality education."

School board member Reverend David Murray complained that the charges announced Wednesday are aimed at small fish, considering the district can't account for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Bobb said oversight mechanisms are now in place to prevent a return to the old ways.

"Clearly, there was a friends-and-family culture, where contracts were let out to friends and family," he said. "We are seeing real change happen in terms of waste, fraud and corruption in the system."

Last July, the district filed a civil lawsuit against the former director of its risk management department, claiming Lawrence Hill and others may have been responsible for the diversion of $45 million. That investigation was launched by former Superintendent Connie Calloway, who has sued the district claiming she was fired, in part, because she was uncovering wrongdoing involving officials and school board members.

The investigation never resulted in criminal charges, although Calloway said she shared her findings with local and federal authorities.

Bobb vowed that larger offenders also are in his sights. "I personally don't care if the crook is the little guy or the chief executive," Bobb said. "We are coming after you."

The following are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law:

Five former Detroit Public School workers to be charged today with embezzlement by a public official:

Maria Roscoe, 46, aka Maria Starkey of Eastpointe, head of program that allegedly paid two workers as athletic coaches, then took kickbacks.
Sandra Carter, 46, of Harper Woods, a teacher's aide at Denby High School, allegedly took more than $20,000 for coaching duties never performed.
Roscoe Smiley, 42, of Detroit, a school district truck driver, allegedly took $1,000 for coaching duties never performed.
Lisa Williams, 41, of Detroit, a clerk at Bow Elementary, accused of taking more than $25,000 from school accounts.
Tammi R. Henry, 39, of Detroit, coordinator of food services at Burns Elementary School, alleged to have stolen lunchroom receipts of more than $400.

Most of this is chump change; there are millions unaccounted.  Still that's five more DPS employees charged with felonies than I thought there would be.

[charliebear]

We saw Charles Pugh last night in Ferndale during the pre-Dream Cruise.  He's running for Detroit City Council, and earned the highest number of votes in the Primary Elections.  He seems like such a nice man.  I wished him luck.

[Savonarola]

With interactive map on the site:

[url] http://www.detnews.com/article/20090817/METRO01/908170334/48-vacant-buildings-blight-downtown-Detroit[/url}

48 vacant buildings blight downtown Detroit
High cost of razing and renovation, low demand stymie development in Central Business District
Louis Aguilar / The Detroit News
Some four dozen big buildings in the heart of Detroit are languishing, vacant, because demand for commercial and office space has dropped and money to demolish or renovate them has dried up.

These are among the most visible ghosts in a city of ghostly buildings -- the harsh, physical evidence of a community that has lost 1 million people from its peak population of 1.8 million in the 1950s.

Some are in shocking condition: sidewalks cordoned off to protect pedestrians from falling chunks of facade; trees growing from roofs.

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"Every major market is having a very difficult time now, but downtown Detroit was at such a low point that our situation is much more severe," said Robin Boyle, chairman of Wayne State University's Department of Urban Planning and Geography.

The city's empty buildings, he added, are difficult to market because redevelopment would take more than just some spit and polish.

"We're looking at a very long, tough stretch, because now what we are really dealing with is the issue of obsolete buildings," Boyle said.

The global recession, tight credit and retrenchment of Detroit's auto industry have stopped much new construction and redevelopment deals in their tracks.

At the same time, the city's $8 million federal fund to demolish buildings will be all but spent after the intended $1.2 million razing of the city-owned Lafayette Building. There is no additional funding expected after that is exhausted. "I don't expect any significant progress for at least two, three years," said Jeff Ball, vice president at CB Richard Ellis, a commercial real estate investment firm.

"The Big Three may have stabilized, but unless they start selling more vehicles, I don't see how anyone makes major deals downtown."

Vacant buildings drain the city of potential taxes and workers who pay to park, buy lunches and shop over their lunch hours. The overall image raises further doubts in the minds of outsiders who might otherwise be interested in setting up shop in Detroit. "For downtown Detroit, it really slows down a lot of the progress that was being made," Ball said.

Narrowing it down
While there is no official ledger of empty buildings, The Detroit News identified 48 major structures with no outward signs of life in the Central Business District, which covers about 127 blocks. Others have one or two remaining tenants.

Absent an official registry, The News used lists provided by city officials and two commercial real estate firms as a starting point in scouring the downtown to determine how many buildings of at least five stories or 10,000 square feet are vacant. That's the size at which developers say a redevelopment deal would likely need major bank loans and tax credits.

Vacancies downtown are only a small part of the story: According to the U.S. Postal Service, there are 62,000 uninhabited buildings and vacant lots throughout Detroit. Entire blocks of commercial and residential property are deserted.

It's impossible to say with certainty, but many believe the number of empty buildings has grown significantly in the past 18 months in the Central Business District, bordered by the Lodge Freeway to the west, I-75 to the north, I-375 to the east and the Detroit River to the south.

"It's hard to imagine it improved over the past two years," said Steve Chaben, senior vice president of commercial real estate investment firm Marcus & Millichap of Southfield.

At least four buildings, including three on Woodward Avenue between Campus Martius and Grand Circus Park, and the 38-story Book Tower on Washington Boulevard, became vacant this year.

The city itself owns three of the empty buildings, including Ford Auditorium in Hart Plaza. And the Wayne County Treasurer's Office seized three buildings in March for nonpayment of taxes.

'Prospects too low'
Some building owners say they no longer are able to hang on for the turnaround.

"The taxes are too high and the prospects too low," said Waad Nahir, chief executive officer of Bosc Equities, which manages the former Peoples Bank building at 751 Griswold. Nahir's building has been empty for seven years, and he hopes to sell it.

"We always had interested tenants who either wanted to lease or buy, but the financing was always tough. We still have people who come through, but the gap of putting the deal together is getting progressively worse."

The downturn is so bad that one building owner says he can't afford to raze a blighted building as city officials have ordered. The roof has collapsed on Anthony Pieroni's Bagley Street building near Grand Circus Park, and he is appealing the city's mandate to demolish it. The building was last used by AAA, seven years ago.

"If I can't make a deal to renovate it, I don't know how they expect me to come up with the funds to tear it down," he said.

Decade started strong
For much of the decade, downtown Detroit was on a roll. More than $500 million was invested.

Eighteen buildings were razed during that time, at least 20 were renovated and occupied, and dozens more were cleaned up. They included loft projects such as the Kales Building in Grand Circus Park, the Lofts at Merchants Row on Woodward, the restoration of the Fort Shelby hotel and a sprinkling of restaurants and nightclubs.

The crowning project during the period was the $200 million restoration of the long-vacant Book Cadillac, which Cleveland developer John Ferchill and the city resurrected into a Westin hotel and upscale condominiums. The penthouse condos were Detroit's first million-dollar downtown residential properties.

Further, an estimated 4,000 people, mainly young and college-educated, moved into the area, bucking the overall trend of the city losing population.

"A lot of us thought we had hit the tipping point," said Derrick Brown, a commercial real estate broker downtown for more than 20 years. "Once the Book Cadillac deal went through, we thought, 'This is it; we can finally get it all done.' "

But it wasn't to be. The office vacancy rate downtown is 27.8 percent, according to CB Richard Ellis, which advertises itself as "the global leader in real estate services."

The decade began in Detroit with a 17.1 percent vacancy rate, and five years ago it was 24 percent.

The U.S. average for downtown office vacancy rates is 13.7 percent, compared with 11.1 percent a year earlier, said Boston-based Colliers International, a commercial real estate brokerage firm.

The rate in Cleveland, similarly bashed by the recession, is 12.22 percent for the second quarter of this year, Colliers said. The rate in Columbus, Ohio, was 14.1 percent.

Lafayette Building's woes
Today, the Lafayette Building, an architectural gem falling apart, is Detroit's new downtown reality. The building, an eyesore on a highly visible piece of real estate, has been empty for 12 years.

Two development deals failed in the past three years to restore the 14-story V-shaped building at 144 W. Lafayette.

The building, across the street from the Westin Book Cadillac, had a number of suitors, but none could put together the financing.

Three years ago, Don Peebles, who helped turn around Miami's wildly successful South Beach, envisioned a $40 million rebirth for the Lafayette: high-end lofts that would sell for more than $350,000. The project collapsed when Peebles couldn't line up the financing.

Then Book Cadillac developer Ferchill gave it a shot. He, too, struck out.

"When I read all these yo-yos saying it can be saved, I'm saying that's just nuts," Ferchill said. "We did the studies and analysis, we tried hard to make the deal work. But there's a $10 million gap. It's impossible."

The city offered the building to Quicken Loans last year for $1.

But the online mortgage company couldn't line up financing for new construction, so it will move its workers into the Compuware Corp. headquarters building at Campus Martius.

Plans for Book Tower
While he gave up on the Lafayette Building, Ferchill said he has "high hopes" for an $87 million renovation of the Book Tower, a block from the restored Book Cadillac, with apartments and retail.

The Book Tower owners, Northeast Commercial Services Corp., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2007, and the last tenant, a bar, closed this year.

"We will get that deal done," Ferchill said.

Meanwhile, the Lafayette is so blighted that the city has been forced to close the sidewalk around it because pieces of the facade are falling off and could harm a vehicle or pedestrian. Inside, floors are caving in, city officials said, and trees have grown on the water-damaged roof.

"We don't have a choice. Demolition is always our last resort," said Waymon Guillebeaux, vice president of the Detroit Economic Growth Corp., the city's economic development arm.

And after the Lafayette Building, the city's demolition fund will have just $300,000 left -- enough to raze a smaller structure, but not one of the big ones.

So for now, city officials await a market turnaround.

"We've made too much progress. It's not like before, where there was little activity downtown," said George Jackson, president of the DEGC. "But the (commercial real estate) market can't stay this way forever.

"It will be a challenging, but Detroit's been through tough times before."

A number of the buildings listed are skyscrapers from 1900-1940.  For instance, the Lafayette building (the one with trees growing on it), is a wonderful 30s era art deco building.  It will be a shame to see them go; but it's worse to see them abandoned for decades at a time.   

[Savonarola]

A day in the life of the DPD:

Detroit's top cop inherits department rife with problems
Warren Evans' challenges: Gun crime, tech gaps and culture of denial
BY AMBER HUNT
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

Six weeks after taking over as Detroit's police chief, Warren Evans doesn't sugarcoat the trouble he has inherited.

More than 850 people in the city have been shot so far this year. Some of the department's police cars don't have working computers to run license plates or names for outstanding warrants. Officers are forced to leave their patrols to file police reports. And a $2.5-million in-car camera system has proved a complete bust.

There's a philosophical disconnect, as well. When Evans began, he noticed that nonfatal shootings were logged in reports in far less jolting terms: Aggravated Assault with a "G."

The "G" stands for gun.

"It indicates a level of denial," Evans told the Free Press while patrolling the city last Wednesday.

Much of this Evans knew going into the job; as Wayne County sheriff for six years, he worked closely with the city on countless crime sweeps. Still, to make sure he fully grasps the city's situation, he insists on being called every time someone is shot.

"I haven't had an uninterrupted night's sleep since I got this job," Evans said.

A bloody day for the chief

The dispatcher's voice is tinny and calm. Someone's been shot at Morang and Somerset. It's 5:15 p.m. Wednesday in Detroit.


"We're not too far away," Detroit Police Officer George Chester says, whipping his car down a side street and gaining speed as he navigates toward a cell phone shop where at least one person has reportedly been gunned down in a carjacking.

Evans is in the passenger seat. He turns up the radio to better hear the details.

"I don't know how many we have shot here," the dispatcher concedes. One caller said a man was shot in the back. Another said a man was hit in the head. Hard to say if they're talking about the same victim.

Chester and Evans pull up to the scene within minutes, just as medics lift George Duncan II on a stretcher from the pavement to the ambulance, a pool of blood marking where he fell.

Minutes later, Evans gets word that Duncan, 48, is dead. Another man, the carjacker's apparent target, is injured but should survive.

This is a typical scene on a typical weekday in typical Detroit, where so far this year about four people have been shot, on average, every day.

Evans took over the top cop position six weeks ago, leaving his six-year post as Wayne County sheriff behind. To make the transition, he began tagging along for twice-weekly patrol shifts with Chester, helping to answer calls.

Fifteen minutes into Wednesday's ride came the call of Duncan's fatal shooting, prompting an hours-long search for the carjacked vehicle and shooting suspect that highlighted the department's strengths and shortcomings in a four-hour span.

Evans admits the bloodshed he's seen is no surprise, but the experience has been eye-opening nonetheless.

"People don't want to get along," he says. "We're having four to six shootings in a day sometimes. If you're not outraged, there's something wrong."

No one saw anything

The scene outside the Cingular cellular shop, where Duncan lies dying, is chaos. Dozens of people mill about. Some talk on cell phones. Others stand cross-armed across the street, dispersing as soon as officers approach to ask if anyone saw the shooting.

Evans and Chester arrive, spot the body and check in with the responding officers. They're simply backup, as much to make sure people see the new chief's face at the scene as anything else.

Evans crosses the street to question a group of young men watching things unfold. No one saw anything, they answer tersely. Evans shakes his head.

"There's not much difference between the suburbs and the city with kids," Evans says. "They don't want to help police. Where you see the difference is in everybody else. In the suburbs, adults don't not help police. They want to help."

In the city, they're as silent as the youngsters. No one wants to get involved.

Not even the victims, sometimes.

"They might know who did it," Evans says, "but all they want is to get better and go out to shoot the person themselves."

Word soon comes that officers have spotted a red Dodge Charger -- the type stolen in the shooting and carjacking -- on I-94 near Chene.

As Chester and Evans speed down I-94 to reach the Charger, they hear an officer on the radio. He's trying to see whether the car's license plate matches the vehicle they're hunting.

Evans shakes his head. Again.

"His computer's down," the chief says of the officer's need to rely on his radio to get info about the plate. That kills time -- time that can mean the difference between needlessly stopping cars or finding a killer.

It turns out that this Charger isn't the one they want. Neither is the young man behind the wheel. But there's no way, without an in-car computer, to quickly check to see whether he's wanted for something else.

Another head shake from Evans.

Myriad of problems

Lax technology is an enemy to Detroit's cops in other ways. Most patrol cars don't have working surveillance cameras, which would help monitor officers' traffic stops -- in part to help make cases stick, but also to keep tabs on cops' behavior.

Concerns about police conduct climaxed in 2000 after the U.S. Justice Department began reviewing a series of suspected civil rights abuses investigated by the Free Press, including questionable shootings by police, illegal roundups of witnesses and inhumane treatment of prisoners.

Tarnished public perception is half the battle he faces, Evans says.

"Nothing I do is going to be successful if the community is not involved," he says.

As he and Chester patrol east-side neighborhoods, Evans is treated more like a celebrity by the city's older residents than a law-enforcement official. One woman waves and screams to thank him. Lawrence Vinson, a former business owner at the scene of Duncan's shooting, rushes to shake his hand.

"I think this guy is a godsend," says Robert Rice, 51, who has lived at 8 Mile and Wyoming for 38 years. "You see a difference in the streets."

Rice says he sees more officers on patrol. Just last week, city police worked with other area and federal law-enforcement agencies to target parolees with past gun offenses in the northeast part of the city. In four days, they made 178 arrests, seized 181 vehicles, issued 823 tickets, recovered 10 firearms and seized nearly 800 grams of narcotics, according to Police Lt. Eric Jones.

When he's out on his patrols with Chester, Evans stops frequently, rolls down the window and says, "How you doing?"

Evans is most concerned with those cross-armed and steel-jawed young men whose body language, the chief says, is "F you."

"They're the ones I talk to first," he says.

Caution, praise, hope

Detroit's problems are so deep-seated that hiring a chief with any local ties is suspect, said David Malhalab, a retired Detroit officer.

New Mayor Dave Bing brought in Evans, whom Bing beat out in a February special election, after booting well-liked Chief James Barren.

Mayoral aide Saul Green said Friday that Evans is off to a "fast and effective start," but Malhalab said the appointment seems too politically motivated, especially given that Bing and Evans had both vied for mayor.

"People are concerned the department's been handed over to the county," Malhalab said.

Barren had been appointed by then-Mayor Ken Cockrel Jr. after Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick pleaded guilty to perjury and left office. Barren was well-liked, Malhalab said. Evans is less so among officers, Malhalab and others said, but he added that there's hope: If Evans follows through on talk of changing how officers have to file reports, morale could improve.

Evans wants more than procedure to change inside the department, he says. He wants to change the mentality.

The chief was shocked when he saw that nonfatal shootings are logged in police reports as Aggravated Assaults with a G -- the G standing for "gun." Gunfire shouldn't be labeled in similar fashion to fistfights, he says. The wording is symbolic of past administrations' attempts to palliate reality, he says.

Bullet holes, drying blood

About two hours after Duncan's shooting, Evans hears that two alert east-side officers spotted the wanted Charger hidden behind a house at Lansdowne and Moross near the Harper Woods border.

There's no mistaking the vehicle, with its windshield spiderwebs around golf ball-size bullet holes. Drying blood is frozen mid-drip down the exterior. Inside, more spattered blood.

Duncan was simply talking to the car's driver when he was gunned down. The driver survived. Residents along Moross tell Evans and other officers they saw a man nervously run from the discarded car to the street, apparently hitching a ride with a summoned friend.

Police have a suspect, but no one had been arrested as of Friday.

Knowing your suspect is not enough. Getting people to help ferret him out is the real challenge.

Until that begins happening, the Detroit-damning crime statistics won't change, Evans says.

"I don't want to be giving speeches from the heart and then have people call the police to get shoddy service," he says. "The end game is not to put on a dog-and-pony show. It's to change the culture.

[Savonarola]

Detroit school board files lawsuit against Bobb
BY CHASTITY PRATT DAWSEY
FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER


The Detroit school board today filed a lawsuit in Wayne County Circuit Court against state appointee Robert Bobb. It alleges that he violated state law by failing to consult with the school board concerning financial matters as required by law.

Bobb is the emergency financial manager appointed by Gov. Jennifer Granholm in January to take over the district's $1.2-billion budget. The district had an estimated $400-million deficit which Bobb has whittled to $259 million through 2,500 layoffs and other cuts.

The lawsuit also alleges that Bobb has exceeded his legal authority by "involving himself in matters of academics, curriculum and/or educational policy."

In the lawsuit, the board is requesting that Bobb consult with the board on the implementation of a financial plan, cease making decisions concerning academics and restore the $125,000 budgeted for the school board to retain outside counsel.

The board is represented by attorney Ben Gonek of Detroit.

I can't imagine why Bobb wouldn't consult on financial issues with the people who put DPS $400 Million in the red.

[charliebear]

A number of the buildings listed are skyscrapers from 1900-1940.  For instance, the Lafayette building (the one with trees growing on it), is a wonderful 30s era art deco building.  It will be a shame to see them go; but it's worse to see them abandoned for decades at a time.   

Couldn't we all chip in and buy one?  I like the Grand Army of Republic Building, located on Grand River.  It's in the upper left corner of the interactive map.  I'll toss in $5.

[DGuller]

More Travels with Charlie

Another gaffe for DPS: Kids' secrets left to rot
Charlie LeDuff / The Detroit News
Detroit -- The secrets of 20,000 schoolchildren lie naked and abused in a deserted warehouse near the Michigan Central Rail Depot.

...

Stories like this make Detroit look like Zimbabwe.  Surely things can't be as bad as they're described?

[Savonarola]

Go deep:

Another $349,000 paid in alleged cop body searches
By BEN SCHMITT
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

The City of Detroit in 2007 paid another $349,000 to a second man who claimed he was victimized by two Detroit Police officers who have been sued over alleged illegal body cavity searches, the Free Press has learned.


Marjjo Clyburn, 34, of Detroit was issued a check on March 6, 2007 — the same day the city cut another check for $349,0000 for Byron Ogletree, 43, who claimed the officers assaulted him after a 2006 traffic stop. The payments were uncovered through Freedom of Information Act requests made by the Free Press.

The payments were issued although city lawyers have maintained there is nothing to the allegations against Officers Michael Osman and Michael Parish. The officers, who are still on the job, have denied the allegations in depositions.

Exact details of Clyburn's allegations against Osman and Parish aren't known because his attorney, Daniel Reid, has declined comment, citing his clients' agreements with the city.

The officers are the focus of eight lawsuits filed by 10 men in U.S. District and Wayne County Circuit courts in Detroit. Several lawsuits have received settlements of up to $25,000.

However, Clyburn and Ogletree never filed lawsuits. They filed claims with the city, which don't have to be approved by City Council.

City Councilwoman Sheila Cockrel said today she's flabbergasted by the claim payouts and has sent a memo to the law department seeking an explanation.

"The claims are generally for smaller amounts of money," she said. "To call it an anomaly is to be charitable. It is highly unusual that this would have settled at the claim level," she said.

Records from 2006 through present show that the payments to Clyburn and Ogletree were by far the largest city claim payouts. The largest claim amount in the 2008-09 fiscal year, which ended June 30, was $25,000 and the total for the year was $157,000.

Both of the $349,000 claim payments were authorized by former Deputy Corporation Counsel Brenda Braceful, whose law license since has been suspended on an unrelated matter.

Assistant City Attorney Paula Cole previously said the officers did nothing wrong. She declined comment today.

Detroit attorney Zachary Posner represents several other men in federal lawsuits against the officers.

"That is a whole lot of real money to spend on making sure false allegations based on some vast community-wide conspiracy never would see the light of day," he said Monday.

Bad cops, bad cops, what you going to do? What you going to do when they come for you?

[Savonarola]

More Travels with Charlie

Another gaffe for DPS: Kids' secrets left to rot
Charlie LeDuff / The Detroit News
Detroit -- The secrets of 20,000 schoolchildren lie naked and abused in a deserted warehouse near the Michigan Central Rail Depot.

...

Stories like this make Detroit look like Zimbabwe.  Surely things can't be as bad as they're described?

One of our power brokers, Sam Riddle, said that the only difference between Detroit and a third world nation is that there aren't goats wandering the streets of Detroit.

[MadImmortalMan]

One of our power brokers, Sam Riddle, said that the only difference between Detroit and a third world nation is that there aren't goats wandering the streets of Detroit.

That could be a way to utilize the decaying space. Grazing land.



Come on, you know it's a great idea, and every organic food proponent should be backing it. Free-range Detroit Goats. They could eat all the garbage and old tires. 

[Savonarola]

I'll bet Kwame can provide us a detailed accont on what she was charging for:

Police reform expense records light on detail
BY BEN SCHMITT, DAVID ASHENFELTER, CHRISTINA HALL and JIM SCHAEFER
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS

The city of Detroit released 1,100 pages of expense reports today that were submitted by federal monitor Sheryl Robinson Wood, who was recently forced from her position overseeing reform efforts at the Detroit Police Department after a federal judge concluded she had an inappropriate personal relationship with former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.

But the paperwork failed to provide much detail to justify the $13 million she and her staff have collected for monitoring the Detroit Police Department over the past six years.

Although the paperwork contained monthly lists of how many hours the monitors worked and how much they were reimbursed for travel, meals and other expenses, there were no vouchers or detailed invoices to show what the city got for its money.

City and police officials have complained for years about a lack of detailed documents to back up the expenses incurred by Wood and her staff. The city was responsible for paying the monitor to oversee it's troubled police department.

One official familiar with the federal oversight of the police department said there was no surprise in the documents the Free Press received today in response to a state Freedom of Information Act request.

"At every turn, she refused to provide the detail that we wanted," said the official, who asked not to be named because the official is not authorized to speak about the case. "We even went to court in 2007 over the issue and lost."

U.S. District Judge Julian Cook appointed Wood in 2003 to oversee court-ordered reforms of the troubled police department. The ordered reforms came after the Free Press revealed in 2000 that police had an extraordinarily high rate of fatal shootings and that follow-up investigations were often cursory and skewed in favor of the officers.

The newspaper also found questionable homicide investigation practices, illegal detention of witnesses and mass dragnet arrests of people who may have witnessed homicides.

As court-appointed monitor, Wood and her team reported to Cook, who required a monthly report listing the expenses and fees incurred by Wood and her staff. After Cook approved the expenditures, the city was required to pay them from an escrow account.

Police executives questioned the lack of expense vouchers or a breakdown of how many hours each monitor worked in the city. But they failed to persuade Cook that a fuller breakdown was required.

The judge declined comment today on why he did not require more detailed expenses from Wood's office.

The expense reports released today listed the amounts of money that Wood requested on behalf of herself and her team for meals, ground transportation, telephone, hotel, parking and air fare.

But few of the reports identified which hotel the monitors stayed in, whether they used limousines versus cabs, or why some flights cost more than $1,000 while other cost around $200.

After six years, less than 40% of the court-ordered police reforms are in place. Long-promised in-car video cameras and a computer system to track officers' performance are still not operational.

Wood resigned in July after Judge Cook issued an order that described "meetings of a personal nature" between her and Kilpatrick. Cook did not elaborate.

Detroit Deputy Mayor Saul Green has said text messages over an 18-month period between the pair led to the resignation. Green, too, would not go into detail.

The text messages referred to were not among the roughly 14,000 text messages that the Free Press earlier obtained which showed that Kilpatrick and his then-aide Christine Beatty had lied at a 2007 police whistle-blower trial.

[MadImmortalMan]

Conyers looks vulnerable in 2010 reelection poll
@ 2:14 pm by Michael O'Brien

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) could face a tough reelection race in 2010, according to a new, independent poll released this weekend.

40 percent of Conyers's constituents said he deserved reelection, according to a poll conducted earlier this month by the Lansing, Mich.-based Deno Noor Polling, in conjunction with the Rossman Group and Perricone Group.

44 percent of Detroiters represented by Conyers said they would prefer to elect someone else. 15 percent were unsure or didn't know.

The 80-year-old Conyers has served in Congress since 1965, making him one of the longest-serving members of Congress still in office. He could face a challenging reelection, though, due to the conviction of his wife, Monica Conyers, for bribery charges incurred while she served as President Pro Tempore of the Detroit City Council.

Rep. Conyers has dodged questions about his wife's conviction, and it isn't clear whether the couple has maintained a close relationship in recent years.

Still, 76 percent of those surveyed said the conduct of Monica Conyers wouldn't affect how they would vote for her powerful husband.

Another Detroit lawmaker's political future could be imperiled by a family member's illicit political conduct, as well.

27 percent of Detroiters said Rep. Carolyn Cheek Kilpatrick (D-Mich.) deserves reelection almost a year after she was almost unseated in a Democratic primary challenge.

58 percent said that someone else should replace Kilpatrick, with 14 percent undecided.

Kilpatrick won a hotly-contested three-way primary last August with 39 percent of the vote after her son, former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, was forced from office after pleading guilty to charges stemming from his testimony denying an extramarital affair to which he later admitted.

60 percent of Detroiters said the former mayor's conduct would have no bearing on their vote for Kilpatrick, who's served in Congress since being elected in 1996.

They're everywhere, and you cannot get rid of them. The Kilpatrick-Conyers axis will continue to thrive.