After watching Flint Town Season 1, I have some feelings...
I feel conflicted. After watching Flint Town, I feel like I understand more than ever why people have so many trust issues with police and why police many times develop an “us versus them” mentality. The season of Flint Town was filmed during the 2016 presidential election season when the water crisis was in full swing. The residents of Flint were already frustrated with the lack of attention and resources they were receiving and the lack of attention businesses were giving to the city. There were no jobs and no money, the city’s budget was a mess and it would regularly take over 24 hours for officers to respond to calls. How would you feel about things if you had little job prospects, had to call multiple times for officers to respond to your home being robbed, trying to work and hold things together, still have to pay a water bill but not be able to drink the water and have to figure out a way to get to a bottled water distribution center during certain times? I’d be pissed off. I’d want to take things into my own hands. So did the residents of Flint, however not necessarily in a positive way. It led to increasing violence and crime. The police officers were overworked and understaffed as there were only 98 officers for a city of 100,000 residents when there should have been 300 officers for a city of this size. The officers would go on shift already 14-20 calls deep and would still have 14-20 calls left at the end of their shift. A new mayor was elected and a new Chief of Police was appointed. They created a Crime Area Target Team and from what I could tell, this task force did just as much hassling people for “loitering” and shutting down stores that had crimes that took place outside the business as they did dealing with shootings, arson and robberies. Once again, if I were a resident and saw all of these resources allocated to hassling people loitering in a parking lot when they didn’t respond to a shooting in my neighborhood that same week, I’d be furious. As far as the officers themselves, there was this prevalent theme of the officers believing they were underpaid and overworked and felt like the residents didn’t respect them when they felt like they were working as hard as they could with the resources they had. Multiple times they discussed how stressful it was being in a situation where they were worried about getting furloughed or laid off. I’m conflicted on that because part of me wants to say “well you chose to work for the government so that’s part of it. People in the private sector get laid off all the time too.” I could easily see how prolonged periods of feeling job insecurity and the stress of always having more work than you can accomplish in a day could very easily escalate into an officer overreacting and lead to another example of police violence. If I were to identity some “takeaways” from watching Flint Town, here they are: Private, Public, Union or NonUnion employee, it’s not your employer’s responsibility to provide you financial security. A HUGE amount of stress can be avoided if you step by step plan for your retirement and an emergency fund for unexpected period of unemployment. The police don’t prevent crime. They respond to crimes after the fact. Be aware of your surroundings, have a safety plan and seriously consider firearms training and concealed carry permits. Know your neighbors. Knowing your neighbors is good for a variety of reasons, but namely if there’s a minor issue, like someone parking in your way or playing their music way too loud, if you know your neighbors, you can walk over and ask them to move their car or turn down the music instead of.
