The Politics of Pandering: Holding Meetings About Public Safety in Private
by P.D. Lesko
When Republican Marcia Higgins was elected to Ann Arbor City Council in 1999, there were over 240 police officers patrolling the town. Ann Arbor had just about as many police officers as the city of Dearborn has today. Dearborn, with 100,000 residents, the 19th District Court, a new Amtrak station (paid for by the feds) and a branch of the University of Michigan, faces many of the same challenges that Ann Arbor does. The difference is that Dearborn residents have not elected fauxgressives determined to bash on in the tradition of Margaret Thatcher, whose brand of politics pushes small government, privatization of public resources, and providing minimal pubic services.
Dearborn has 400 acres of parkland, six public pools, a new $50 million dollar public community center with a 1,400 seat theater, rock climbing wall and two indoor public pools. The city also had a city hall built in 1920. That building was recently sold, rather than rehabbed, and city government was moved into a vacant ADP Building on Michigan Avenue. The mayor of Dearborn explained: “So the reality is, I’m trying to prepare Dearborn in a new economy, where we will get by with less money without cutting services. Well, if I’m going to cut our overhead on what it cost to operate a building, what it cost to maintain a building, and the capital investment I have to put put into an old building, I would rather do that than lay off police and fire.”
In contrast, Ann Arbor’s mayor told AnnArbor.com he was “pretty comfortable” with the cuts made to police and fire over the course of his tenure, cuts that have reduced the police from 85 beat cops to 1, from a police force of 240 officers to a police force of 128 police officers. Republican-turned-Democrat Marcia Higgins voted in support of every city budget that called for funding cuts to safety services, as well as budgets that required open positions in the police and fire departments to remain unfilled. Not only John Hieftje was “pretty comfortable” decimating the city’s police and fire services; he was just the one arrogant enough to say the words in a room full of AnnArbor.com reporters.
Now, Ward 4 Council member and Mayor Pro Tempore Marcia Higgins wants to hear what you think about public safety in Ann Arbor. Well, not you, exactly. You don’t live in her part of town. She wants to hear what people in Ward 4 think about crime. Well, not all of the people who live in her Ward, exactly. A “safety meeting with Ann Arbor Police” was announced on a private social network for neighbors in the Dicken Elementary School area. Marcia Higgins is hosting the meeting at her house. In other words, it’s a meeting about public safety concerns held in private. No nosy reporters from AnnArbor.com or chroniclers from the AnnArborchronicle.com. Just Marcia Higgins, a representative from the AAPD, and a handful of residents of Ward 4.
It’s almost as if Higgins (pictured right) is channeling the ghost of Christmas Past once played by former Ward 2 Council member Tony Derezinski. Tony D. was famous for his cozy get togethers at his house at which select Ward 2 residents got to mingle and hear from the likes of “retiring” Ann Arbor Transportation Authority Board member Jesse Bernstein, who expounded on the merits of county-wide transportation—before the whole plan went south, and took Bernstein down with it. Derezinski was trounced in the 2012 Democratic primary by a cheeky opponent whose supporters pointed out that such meetings were not, well, very inclusive.
Evidently, news travels slowly between Ward 2 polling locations and Marcia Higgins’s house.
It would actually take a boatload of chutzpah for Marcia Higgins to speak at any meeting about public safety. In May 2009, as Chair of the City Council Budget and Labor Committee, it was Higgins who helped engineer the early retirement of 27 Ann Arbor police officers. The city paid out $6 million to the officers to get them to retire early. Had City Council waited two years, the officers could have retired, and taxpayers could have saved the $6 million dollars. Higgins argued that the officers needed an incentive to retire early; she argued there would be big savings. Projected operating cost savings in 2010, $1.6 million; in 2011, $1.9 million; in 2012, $1.9 million; in 2013, $2.0 million. The projected savings never materialized and the cost for the lost officers was shuffled from the city’s General Fund (which pays for services) to the city’s underfunded employee pension and health care funds (which is funded from tax dollars).
Between 2009 and 2013, Marcia Higgins voted in favor of budgets which called for cuts in safety services, including reductions in both police and fire staffing levels. She also repeatedly voted against proposals to increase funding to safety services. This year, she offered no proposals to increase funding for safety services, and voted against a proposal to reduce the City Attorney office’s budget by $90,000 (about 4 percent) and reallocate that money to public safety.
Marcia Higgins has voted more reliably to use tax dollars to subsidize developers than she has to fund safety services. So what’s up with Marcia Higgins and her sudden love affair with public safety issues? She’s facing an opponent who has, over the past four years, has called for the rebuilding of safety services with the tenacity of Cato the Elder.
Higgins’s opponent, Jack Eaton, has argued that over the past decade, along with John Hieftje, Higgins has supported the decimation of what was once a robust, proactive police department. Eaton inconveniently and frequently points out that AAPD Police Chief John Seto has made it clear that at the current level of funding the AAPD can’t provide proactive, community policing. Thus, we are left with a police department that can only try to react to crime calls as they come in. Sometimes, thanks to human error, the AAPD doesn’t even do that. Recently, Eaton sent an email to Council members in which he alleged that an Ann Arbor resident called 911 to report that an intruder has broken into her home and was told to “Call back if it happens again,” because the intruder had left.
As it turned out, the woman called back, talked to a different dispatcher, and about 25 minutes after her first call police were sent to the woman’s home.
In response to Eaton’s email to City Council members, including Higgins, Chief Seto investigated and concluded that a mistake had been made on the part of the dispatch unit. Nonetheless, Chief Seto assured Council members that the situation had been handled. The truth of the matter is that John Seto doesn’t have enough officers to provide the proactive policing that Ann Arbor taxpayers deserve. In large part, we all have Marcia Higgins to thank for that fact.
Dicken neighbors are concerned about the May 15th beating and attempted robbery of a 17-year-old Pioneer student. The crime happened in broad daylight. The perpetrators have not been identified or caught. Now, Marcia Higgins’s political bloomers are bunched up enough to have her not only meeting with the residents of her Ward—something she rarely does—but meeting with them at her house. While her concern is touching, it also stinks of the kind of political opportunism for which members of the Hive Mind Collective are famous. Marcia Higgins is regularly lambasted in the comment section of AnnArbor.com for being uninvolved, unavailable to her constituents and arrogant.
Within a two mile radius of Pioneer high school, between January 1, 2013 and May 27, 2013 there were 567 crimes committed, according to information from the Ann Arbor Police Department, including 95 assaults, 30 drug busts (including busts for possession of heroin) and 4 sexual assaults. Evidently, none of those crimes caught Higgins’s attention. That is not a surprise. In 2012, a series of six serial rapes didn’t catch her attention, either. Like the individuals who beat up the teenager on his way home from school, the serial rapist was never caught. In fact, before Marcia Higgins found out that she was being challenged for her seat by a very strong candidate whose views of the importance of funding basic services conflict with her votes against funding basic services, she did little but support budgets that reduced safety services. She did this despite the fact that, when running for Council in 2009, she claimed at a candidate debate that her “top priority” was the protection of “vital city services” – police, fire, garbage.
Having a private meeting with a handful of people from a single neighborhood in the city at her home about public safety is just plain wrong. The Mayor Pro Tempore of the sixth largest town in Michigan has no business holding a private meeting about public safety. To do so because it suits her political purposes is an unforgivable insult to the 566 other people who were assaulted, robbed, raped and victimized in the same area as the unfortunate Pioneer high school student between January and May 2013.
If Marcia Higgins has something to say about crime in Ann Arbor, about crime around Pioneer high school, about the assault of a student, about the fact that the police have not found the assailants, she needs to say it all in public. Just in case you’d like to pop by and let the Mayor Pro Tempore know what you think, here’s the invite:
Event: Safety meeting with Ann Arbor Police
Host: Marcia Higgins
Time: Wednesday, May 29, 2013 08:00PM
Location: 1535 Westfield Ave