It Ain’t That Bad in Detroit

Ambulances that more often do not show up than do, police that fail, shootings in the streets and everyone “thinking this is the most normal thing in the world” — the reporting on Detroit, Mich., the city which filed for bankruptcy yesterday, is poor, says science journalist Maarten Keulemans. He investigated how it really is.

Is there no end to the plagues of that poor, bankrupt city Detroit? Unemployment is massive, neighborhoods are unpeopled and dilapidated, crime rates are sky-high and something we also hear all day long: When you need an ambulance or another emergency service, they will not come.

This is how reporter Wessel de Jong explained it tonight in the NOS news: “Calling an emergency phone number like 911 is hardly useful. Ambulances more often do not show up than do. So people in the city have been given the advice to keep an eye on their health and not wait until it is too late. Of course, there is the same problem with the police: It often takes an hour before they are on site. Enormous crime rates. I was in Detroit the other day; there was extensive shooting outside my hotel room. It was the most normal thing in the world for everyone.”

Ouch, that is quite something. Was it really? Ambulances that more often do not show up than do, police that often take an hour to show up — that sounds more like something angry people would say to each other than objective reality. Indeed.

Emergency Calls

First, the problems with emergency number 911. A bit of searching in the local media shows that this story goes back to last year. The Detroit police took a controversial measure to unburden their cops a little by telling them not to turn up for every emergency call anymore.

For example, those who would have called 911 for a crime that had already been committed, the perpetrator had already disappeared and there were no dead or wounded people had to call the regular police from then on. Quite something for Americans, especially in a city where crime is soaring. An invitation to crooks, blogs and talk shows groaned; you don’t even have to bother calling 911 anymore. In the media, the story appeared of a man who had to wait for the police for six long hours after a suspicious person looked through his window.

Scandalous! But in reality the situation is not so very different from ours: You call the emergency number only if every second matters. The emergency services then show up at your doorstep in less than 15 minutes, as shown by an official rating list of the Detroit municipality. That is fairly long when every second matters, but “practically useless to call” seems a bit overdone to me.

Ambulances

Hold on, “ambulances that more often do not show up than do” the TV person said? It is almost inevitable that this is a misinterpretation of a figure that press agency Reuters highlighted today in a “fact box”: In Detroit, two thirds of all ambulances are broken.

However, that again is a misinterpretation, one from a report that Detroit filed last month to get extra money. It is stated slightly different in that report: “During the first quarter of 2013, frequently only 10 to 14 of the city’s 36 ambulances were in service….” “In March 2013, a group of corporations pledged to donate $8 million to the city, a portion of which will be used to upgrade the city’s fleet of EMS vehicles. The donation is expected to add 23 new leased EMS vehicles to the city’s fleet as replacements for older vehicles.”

In fact, there was a problem with the ambulances, but that problem has been fixed in the meantime. Rest assured that if you have a medical crisis in Detroit, the ambulance will come.

58 Minutes?

But what about the police who take “often an hour” to arrive on site? That also seems to be true at first glance. It comes from The New York Times, which wrote a week ago: “The Detroit police’s average response time to calls for the highest-priority crimes this year was 58 minutes, officials now overseeing the city say.”

That sounds serious, but what you’d almost forget is that this does not concern emergency calls to 911, but calls to the “normal” police. The figure of 58 minutes comes from an overview of response times of police, fire departments and ambulances in Detroit.

The figure is already outdated: During the last assessment, it took the police on average 40 minutes to respond to a phone call, notably one of the few figures that show the police doing better than planned.

No matter how bad the situation is in Detroit, some things are not that bad. What was it called again when an old wives’ tale is pumped around and around until it starts to take on a new life? Oh right, that expression indicating that especially in cities, gossip makes the rounds: an urban myth.