Episodes
Monday Aug 11, 2014
Leid Stories - 08/11/14
Monday Aug 11, 2014
Monday Aug 11, 2014
Running Dry In Detroit: More Than 100,000 At Risk of Water Shutoffs
Seeking Justice for Eric Garner, But Sharpton Is In A Political Chokehold
Add a water crisis and a fast-developing public-health problem to the long list of miseries heaped upon beleaguered Detroiters as the city seeks to declare bankruptcy.
Tens of thousands of households unable to pay their water bills have no running water. And 100,000 more facing shutoffs aren’t sure what will happen after a citywide moratorium ends on Aug. 25.
Curt Guyette, an investigative reporter for the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan focusing on Michigan’s emergency management law, discusses the human-rights and related legal issues raised by the water-shutoff crisis, and says that the shutoffs are being done “in a way that disproportionately affects African Americans, a concern echoed by the United Nations.”
The Rev. Al Sharpton’s Aug. 23 “March for Justice for Eric Garner” across the Verrazano Bridge into Staten Island instead will be a caravan—owing to safety concerns, not capitulation to City Hall or the NYPD, he says.
But even as he takes the lead in channeling the community’s outrage over Garner’s NYPD-inflicted chokehold death, demanding justice in the case, Sharpton is himself in a political chokehold, and it already is affecting the legal course of the case.
Leid Stories explains.