I hadn't heard about this until just today but it's nothing short of an outrage.
On September 12th, 2013, Bill Nowling casually stated that the city’s power outages were intentional. Officials and citizens working in the city were given no warning before the electricity was cut off. Law enforcement officials working in the Hall of Justice had no time to prepare. Senior citizens and disabled citizens using elevators in the city’s downtown district had no way to know what was coming. The entire criminal justice system was shut down without notice. Wayne State University Campus was just one of many sites evacuated under emergency conditions. Traffic lights across the city stopped working. 1,400 public and private locations were left without power. And the entire thing was intentional, to “send a message” to the people of Detroit. Bill Nowling works in the office of Kevin Orr, Detroit’s Emergency Manager.
And
He then says that people “didn’t respond as fast as we would like them to, so we had to send them a strong message, by turning off the power.”
Read the whole article please. Thoughts below the fold
This is nothing short of collective punishment. An unelected GOP official chose to do this to Detroit to teach them a lesson. If this had taken place under an occupying power then it would have been a war crime. The fact that a city that is majority black is being subjected to collective punishment is if not fascism just shy of it. We're looking at a takeover of the state of Michigan by the worst our government has to offer.
Our government was set up explicitly to prevent exactly these sort of outcomes, and yet here we are with a psuedo-dictator cutting power to traffic lights to send people a message. I don't think it can be overstated how bad this situation is. At this point I would go so far as to say that it's reasonable for Detroiters to consider the GOP appointed officials as an occupying force. Ultimately, this cannot be let stand. Someone in government needs to be punished for this outrage. I these sort of actions are allowed to happen without acountability I can guarantee that they will continue to happen.