The Calls Left Unanswered
Flint is a small city with a big reputation. In the 1960s, it was known for cars — GM headquartered its company in Flint and massive factories like Buick City employed thousands of people. In the 1990s it became a symbol of the nation’s dying manufacturing industry and suburban white flight. Today, the city is probably best known for its devastating water crisis. In 2014, a cost-cutting measure to change water sources backfired horribly and corroded the city’s water pipes, leaching lead into the drinking supply. While the original decision to change water supplies was intended to save $5 million, repairing Flint’s damaged water infrastructure will ultimately cost between $750 million and $1.5 billion.[1] Covered up by government officials, the water toxicity was only brought to light due to the efforts of private citizens, doctors, and researchers. But this piece is not about water. This piece is about Flint’s underfunded police department trying to meet the needs of its overwhelmingly impoverished citizens. It’s about the potential for social media to fill in the gaps when city departments lack the resources for community outreach. And it’s about the potential for data to inform the reality of police work in the face of austere budgeting.
Zack Canepari is a photographer and filmmaker who’s been documenting life in Flint for the past five years. He came to Flint to cover the rise of Olympian Claressa ‘T-Rex’ Shields, who in 2012 won the first gold medal in women’s boxing at the age of seventeen. He invited me to collaborate on a chapter about the Flint Police Department for an online documentary series about the city, to see if there might be an opportunity for data visualization to help tell the story of Flint’s overstretched police force.
Before the water crisis, Flint was the namesake of the vanishing industrial workforce in America. Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary Roger and Me highlighted GM’s decision to start shutting down its factories in the area. Flint, which was ground zero for automotive manufacturing unions in the US after a worker sit-in strike in 1937, suffered the fate of many union labor dominated industries. By the late ’80s, GM began moving its factories to Mexico and other cheaper manufacturing areas, closing Buick City in 1999 and laying off thousands of workers. Lack of employment opportunities, frustration with and fear of crime, and white flight to suburban areas have all contributed to the city’s shrinking size. Since the 1960s, when Flint’s population peaked at almost 200,000, the city has lost half of its residents. In 2013, the population dipped below 100,000 for the first time in years. Not only does this pattern mimic trends in other Rust Belt cities like Detroit and St. Louis, but it also affects Flint’s ability to receive federal and state funding.
As the former Flint City Council President Scott Kincaid declared in a 2014 interview, “Our block grant dollars will be treated like other small cities and townships. [Being under 100,000] will substantially reduce our federal funding.”[2] State funding would also be reduced to reflect a smaller city’s need. Many federal and state grant programs have fixed formulas to determine the best ways to allocate funding. Oftentimes a shrinking population won’t be able to rely on as much funding as they did in the past, or lose eligibility for some programs entirely.
In addition to these issues, the state of Michigan has dramatically reduced Flint’s options to address its shrinking tax base. In 1978 and 1994, Michigan passed laws that limit city governments’ ability to increase tax revenue, and reduced the amount that the state was required to share with local governments. From 1998 to 2012, funds going from Michigan state revenue to city governments dropped from $900 million to $215 million, a seventy-six percent decrease.[3] Over the same period, sales tax revenues went from $6.6 billion to $7.72 billion, leaving the state with a billion dollar surplus while it decreased grants to city governments.[4]
Today, Flint, MI is the country’s second most poverty-stricken city for its size.[5] 41% of the city’s population lives below the poverty line, compared to about 14% nationally.[6] In 2010 to 2012, it had the highest rate of crime per capita among cities with more than 100,000 residents (when it still barely had over 100,000), leading some news outlets to dub it “the most violent city in America.”[7]
The rise in crime is correlated with other cost-saving measures the city has had to put in place to account for its diminished tax base. In 2003, Flint reduced its police force by almost half, bringing it down to 112 officers. Over the next decade, crime rates soared, making Flint top the FBI’s most dangerous cities in America for three years in a row between 2010–2012. On a typical day, the police department gets about 400 dispatch calls. Only around 20% of these calls have units assigned to further investigate them.
Mapping crime is an exercise fraught with bias. Many white-collar crimes like embezzlement are not called in over the dispatch, so the data is skewed towards crimes that happen to have a geolocation attached to them.[8] Visualizing crimes as mere dots on a map also distances people from understanding the reality of what took place, the circumstances leading to it, or any mitigating information about the suspects — a phenomenon sometimes referred to as the “cartographic gaze.”[9]
Several precedents highlight the complexity of the process. Created by Stamen Design in 2007, the Oakland Crimespotting Map was a groundbreaking public data endeavor when it was first released. It helped propel a movement to have city agencies open up civic data in order to be more transparent with their communities. Yet the Oakland Crimespotting Map is confined to the limitations of the dataset it visualizes. Most data that the police can share with the public has been redacted of most, if not all, specific information about the crime, and appears as a tally of geolocated incidents or dots on a map. While the Oakland Crimespotting Map provides excellent filtering tools, as well as ways to sign up for feeds from a particular beat, there is no data to provide a more comprehensive view of the crimes, like interviews with witnesses, victims and suspects. Many police departments have followed suit and release crime data online, often visualized on a map, and almost always highlighting only the most serious property and violent incidents.
The selection of what types of incidents to visualize tends to highlight the most violent crimes, without acknowledging what else is going on in the community, or the other aspects of police work. Some spatial data projects have combated this by including other types of imagery, like Google Street View, that give a different vantage point for the streets and help disrupt the dominant trend of satellite imagery and bird’s eye view intrinsic to many crime maps.
Flint offers a unique chance to look at ways social media has allowed citizens to engage more directly with policing crime in their community. Flint Police Operations is a public Facebook group that posts each complaint that the Flint Police Department receives. A group of about twenty people share duties of listening to the dispatch radio and transcribing what they hear into a Facebook post. The page is administered by a group of paramedics, firefighters, ex-military personnel, and concerned citizens. About seven administrators take turns monitoring the dispatch radio streams each day.
A sample post might be:
WARRANT PICKUP: 4100 blk Townview Dr. B/M, 5’7\”, 205 lbs, is a runner, will fight. Cars on alert. DELAYED POST. #FlintTwp
MEDICAL: 2000 blk Paducah. 7 yr old female trouble breathing. #Flint #GCSDMedics
The reality is that only a fraction of these incidents will get assigned to and investigated by a police or EMS unit. The posts on the Facebook page provide an alternate channel for community members to “be on the lookout” or gather information about an incident, most knowing full well that police won’t be able to follow up.
The page currently has more likes than there are residents of Flint, and many posts receive replies from concerned citizens providing additional information, offering prayers, and inquiring about the cases or health of the victims. And although the page has a code of conduct, many comments seem to mock descriptions of people coming in over the wire, or express disgust with the amount of crime in Flint. But in essence, the page provides a public record and channel for citizens to give and receive information about what happens in their community.
Anonymous commenter, Facebook Police Operations page:
Take a look around. Its not just flint. Its everywhere. We just don’t hear about those places because… Well, we’re not following their (if they have any) police pages. We’re not there to witness it. We’re here to witness Flint’s.
While the majority of incidents that receive comments tend to be the more sensational or violent, or are simply responses to news articles about other aspects of life in Flint — the water crisis, or factory closures — the overwhelming majority of calls that come over the dispatch are nonviolent, classified as WELFARE CHECKS, where police are called on to follow up with people who haven’t been heard from or who are in need of help.
In 2016, when fatal shootings by police and the Black Lives Matter movement have galvanized communities around the need for officers to make all citizens feel safe, community policing has repeatedly been put forward as a solution to improve police relations with the citizens they serve. The Flint Police Department is so understaffed for the volume of calls they receive that they spend 57.4 minutes out of every hour of their shifts answering incidents, leaving an average of only 2.6 minutes of that hour for community policing.[10]
The Flint Police Department underwent an investigation of their operating procedures in order to see if improvements could be made to the way the department allocated their limited resources.
From the Flint Operations Analysis Report:
The Flint Police Department is an agency facing many challenges in providing police services to the community. The department’s lack of resources combined with a high crime rate are creating conditions that make radical changes to operations necessary. The FPD must reorganize internally and reprioritize demands made by the community. At the same time, the community must understand the daunting challenges facing the department and must cooperate to the greatest extent possible in helping the department meet those challenges.
The report suggested tactics like creating 12 hour shifts to decrease the amount of productivity lost in a shift change. But at a certain point, an already overwhelmed police force simply can’t address more demand. They call on the community to be more understanding of the demands they’re facing, and to take an active approach to help keep their community safe.
How do we improve the outlook for shrinking cities?
In cities like Flint and Detroit, infrastructure leftover from a much larger population becomes targets for arson and criminal activity. The state university in Flint has been one measure to attract people to Flint and build up the diminished middle class, but the city is far from its manufacturing glory days.
The Facebook group offers a more qualitative approach to looking at crime in Flint. While the Flint Police Department receives some useful tips from the site, its main effect is to empower the community to take an active role in protecting and looking out for one another. The Facebook comments act as feedback to the problems the city faces. Feedback that highlights people’s concerns, frustrations, and scapegoating for who might be to blame for Flint’s violence. And while the Facebook group seems to be a place for members of the once dominant middle class to air their grievances, there is a tinge of race-based blame at play. From a cursory examination of Facebook profile pictures from the commenters, it seems that a majority of active commenters are white. The demographic breakdown of Flint is 54.7% black, 36.9% white, 3.8% Hispanic, 3.6% Biracial or multiracial, and 1.03% Asian, American Indian, and Pacific Islander.[11] Just as the city is primarily segregated between white and black households, the Facebook group seems to be as well.
Most of the comments do remind us that people are generally concerned about each other’s welfare, and hope the best for those affected by hardship. Mapping the incidents along with dispatch audio might help to remind people of the men and women hard at work answering those calls. Visualizing Facebook comments speaks to the calls that were left unanswered, but perhaps replied to.
Working with Facebook comments in this way presents a few challenges. One of the biggest is how to connect Facebook comments with the geolocated police incidents which they reference. Those individuals listening to dispatch radio, both on the Flint Police Department side and the Flint Police Operations Facebook group, ultimately create the incident entry from their transcription of the information coming through the call. At times, the Facebook posts are delayed, or the description no longer matches what’s been entered into the police database. Without a unique identifier or key to join them, correlating these data sets remains very difficult.
Visualization tools that enable real-time feedback from the community have the potential to shape police work in powerful ways, from generating leads for investigations to providing more context to limited information. However, the hurdles of data consistency and access, as well as convincing key stakeholders that the potential utility might outweigh the overhead costs or possible risks of using social media data, are challenging. While a real-time solution isn’t possible for the Flint is a Place visualization, hopefully it can expand the possibilities of what crime mapping visualizations do.
Flint is a Place will be released online in 2017.
This essay will be published in The Office For Creative Research’s quasi-annual journal, which is available for pre-order now.
Resources/Footnotes
- Ryan Felton, “How Flint traded safe drinking water for cost-cutting plan that didn’t work.” The Guardian, January 23, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/23/flint-water-crisis-cost-cutting-switch-water-supply
- Roy Fonger, “Flint’s population falls below 100,000 for first time since the 1920s,” mlive.com, May 22, 2014. Web: http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2014/05/flints_population_falls_below.html. Domestic aid programs like HUD’s Community Development Block Grant allocate funds based on population.
- Bryce Covert, “How Racism And Anti-Tax Fervor Laid The Groundwork For Flint’s Water Crisis.” ThinkProgress, February 6, 2016. Web: https://thinkprogress.org/how-racism-and-anti-tax-fervor-laid-the-groundwork-for-flints-water-crisis-83331b13f101
- http://www.mml.org/advocacy/great-revenue-sharing-heist.html
- After Youngstown, Ohio. (US Census Survey 2015)
- US Census Survey 2015
- David Harris, “Most violent city in the nation: The title that Flint can’t kick.” mlive.com, June 4, 2013. Web: http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2013/06/the_most_violent_city_in_the_n.html
- Theo Kindynis. “Ripping up the Map: Criminology and Cartography Reconsidered,” British Journal of Criminology 54.2 (2014): 222–43. Web: http://bjc.oxfordjournals.org/content/54/2/222.abstract
- John Pickles. A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World. Routledge. (2004) Web: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2006.688_1.x/abstract
- Police Operations Analysis Report, Flint, Michigan. November (2014): 12. Web: https://www.cityofflint.com/wp-content/uploads/CPSM-Flint-Police-Operational-Report.pdf
