More than 1,000 people took to the streets of downtown Detroit to protest against the city’s ongoing water shutoff initiative, while a number of civil rights organizations formally called for a moratorium on the practice.
The protest was organized amid a time Detroit’s water shutoffs have attracted considerable international attention, as well as from the bankruptcy judge overseeing the city’s Chapter 9 case.
“Water is a basic right,” said Desiree Conyers, 59, a nurse living in Ann Arbor.
Calling the shutoffs “ridiculous,” Conyers, a member of the Michigan Nurses Association, the state’s branch of protest-organizer National Nurses United, said her group would like to see a federal tax implemented on all financial transactions that would flow to states, and then cities for basic services.