The street lights are out. The porch lights are off. The empty houses and vacant lots are illuminated by headlamps and siren strobes and police-cruiser searchlights, flashes of color amid myriad shades of gray. The murder victims are both black and white, as are the perps, in handcuffs, and the cops, in blue. For all of them, living in Flint, Michigan, is a story of the struggle to survive.
The photographer Zackary Canepari is among the few outsiders with sustained interest in the internal rot of this American city. A native of Boston who now lives between New York and the Bay Area, he has been documenting life in Flint since 2012, including the water crisis that poisoned the city’s residents; an eight-part documentary series called “Flint Town,” which Canepari made with Jessica Dimmock and Drea Cooper, premières on March 2nd, on Netflix. For his most recent series of images, he examined the Flint Police Department. How does law enforcement work in a place in constant crisis?
Officer Bridget Balasko holds a small child while the girl’s father is being searched and questioned. March, 2016.
The answer is that it doesn’t, not really. Flint was once a place of promise, the birth town of General Motors, the U.A.W. strike, and mass credit. Then G.M. moved away. Flint went broke and could no longer afford its police. To save money, the city shuttered its police academy and cut its police force in half. Crime, naturally, doubled.
In November of 2015, Flint elected a new mayor, Karen Weaver, who in turn hired a new chief of police, Tim (Two Guns) Johnson. A hard-charger who preached zero tolerance (cracking down on minor offenses) and proactive policing (deterring crime before it happens), Johnson faced an already catastrophic erosion of trust between Flint’s residents and its law enforcement. As Brian Willingham, a local black police officer who is featured in the Netflix series, wrote in a Times Op-Ed, in 2016, “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?”
A Flint resident shows his scars from a recent shooting. The police found him asleep in his car, high on painkillers. July, 2016.
A busted window from a shootout on Flint's North Side. November, 2015.
Canepari embedded with Johnson’s department from late 2015 through early 2017. The police officers he trails in “Flint Town” are overwhelmed and disgruntled. They've become little more than custodians in a city that is ranked the nation’s poorest and among its most violent; as Willingham puts it, “The people who secure the city are less secure than they’ve ever been.” Canepari was with the force in January of 2016, when Rick Snyder, the governor of Michigan, acknowledged a public-health emergency related to the poisoned water. A week later, a man was found frozen on a lawn, a bullet hole in his head. “Straight-up assassination,” as an officer on the scene put it. It was the first homicide of the year. The crime, like too many in Flint, remains unsolved.
The body of sixteen-year-old Shaun Labelle was found lying in the snow outside of his house in South Flint on December 11, 2016.
One of Canepari’s subjects, Sergeant Robert Frost, works the lobster shift. He, like many Flint police officers, has been laid off and called back to work three times over the past dozen years, because Flint is too poor to pay him. “We’ve got, like, eight people working at any given time for a hundred thousand people, and there’s no way to be proactive,” he told me. “You get one call, you handle that call, you do the best you can, because there is nothing you can do about the other fifty calls that are sitting there.” He added, “We’re just scraping the bottom of the barrel, just trying to keep up.”
For residents, a bare-bones police department just feels like more abandonment. In a clip from the Netflix series, a black woman is seen calling the police to report that men have been shooting at kids on her block. She called an hour before but no officers had come. On the other end of the line, the dispatcher tells her that it’s the third shooting of the day. The police are on their way, but they’re a little backed up.
“They want shit like this to happen in Flint—they want all of us to kill each other so there won’t be no more shit they have to come to,” the woman says after she hangs up. “That’s why all of our young black boys keep getting killed.”
A Flint police officer picks up a gun found in an abandoned home. February, 2016.
The remains of the Flint Police Academy, one of numerous abandoned police-department structures in the city. May, 2017.
A woman is arrested for public intoxication on the North Side of Flint. November, 2015.
A man is held on the ground during a raid by the Crime Area Target Team (CATT) at a drug house. August, 2016.
A photo left on the floor of an abandoned home. December, 2015.
A teen-ager is tackled and arrested after a football game at Northwestern High School. August, 2016.
Police lights shine on an abandoned home next to a homicide scene. November, 2015.
Dion Reed, twenty-one, on his first night shift as a Flint police officer. June, 2016.
A fire rages at the B Light Restoration Center. The fire was ruled accidental. November, 2015.
Members of the Crime Area Target Team (CATT) prepare for a raid. July, 2016.
Police cadets train for civil unrest at the Mott Police Academy. February, 2016.
Sourse: newyorker.com
