The view from outside the D: dirty cops and ruin porn

I'm thinking today about this article from the Detroit News: Gang cop's actions cost Detroit $677,000.

I'm most concerned about the comment by Councilman Gary Brown at the end of the article, when he says that Hughes isn't even the worst cop on the force with these sorts of complaints.  It begs the question: who's covering up for those guys?  If there are other cops pulling even worse violations, then someone somewhere should be talking about it... but they're not.

How much more hush-hush money can this city afford to spend?  How many more under-the-table deals will the City Council make before someone with the ability to stop it takes notice?   Or maybe there's nobody with any ability to stop anything.  That's the most depressing thought of all.

This city can't afford many more settlements like this.  We can't afford this many dirty, abusive cops.  We can't afford the levels of graft and collusion that have come to be part and parcel of Detroit and its city government.  We can't afford it, and yet we keep paying it, year after year after year.  And nobody does a damn thing to make a change.

Things have changed in the D.  We've all seen it.  The world has seen it, since the only tourists we really get these days are nosy Europeans with cameras who come in, spend no money and take out only pictures of the underbelly of the city.  It's decay tourism at its worst, foreigners who come in like vultures to pick at a carcass without bothering to take the time to notice that the victim isn't dead yet.  These photos, urban ruin porn, even had a featured run in a UK newspaper:  the Guardian UK.  This isn't the sort of attention this city needs, and it's not even accurate on the whole.

But there's more to Detroit than rotting buildings, violent cops and abusive officials.  Time was, and time probably still is, that there were good men and women behind the badge here in this city.  There have been and probably still are councilmen and women with good intentions who really do try to serve their constituents more than they serve themselves.  The problem is that those people are mostly silent, leaving the city to noisemakers like Hughes, Yves Marchand, Romain Meffre, and yes, even this blogger to point out all the bad that the city has to offer.

I hope that Detroit can get out from under the weight of its own reputation.

This is not lost on me.  I'm the Motown Investigator, and I've got my eye on you.