The city owns about 10 percent of the real estate in Detroit, including hundreds of homes inhabited by squatters, and stretches of urban prairie that are home to ring-necked pheasants and exotic plants. Clean the rubbish from the storm sewer on your street. Pick up the broken glass in your alley. Go with your neighbors to cut the weeds in the lot on the way to your street. But the city often was guilty of failing to do its share of cleaning.
Residents complain of illegal dumping and poor trash pick-up.
Under Archer the buses did not always run on time, nor did they under any mayor going back to at least Cavanagh. And the ladders failed to work all the time on the fire trucks, which was only one of many grave problems that surfaced under Archer. Then there is the police department. Over the past several months, the Free Press has reported that Detroit officers have fatally shot a higher percentage of civilians than other big-city forces have, used dragnets to round up witnesses in homicide investigations, mistreated prisoners in precinct lockups and, for 17 years, reported inaccurate crime data. The U.S. Justice Department is investigating.