For years, the city of Manistee has been looking to take care of the issue of blight in the area, and now the police is out in the community helping those who need it.
“We want to be out there and be able to provide solutions for the public,” said Chief of Police Josh Glass.
Manistee City Police wanted to make a change from the way it was enforcing blight before.
“We took a look at what we currently do for blight enforcement…we realized we could do better, so we developed a program,” Glass says.
That program splits the city into eight different neighborhoods and assigns an officer to each district.
“By breaking the city into eight different districts, it allowed for us to get our officers out in the neighborhoods and to have the one-on-one contact with members of the public,” Glass says.
Sgt. Thomas Bruce, who helps oversee the program, says communication with residents has gone a long way.
“We stop and talk with them and communicate,” Bruce said. “Ninety-nine percent of the time we get it resolved that way, just talking with them just trying to find out exactly what’s going on.”
The police are also providing extra resources for those who may be struggling.
“We understand that, that people have lost their jobs they’re laid off and there’s some economic issues here,” Glass said. “We don’t want to have to write tickets, we don’t want to have to find people, we’d rather work with them to resolve these issues.”
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